Submitted by Soulless Zombie on Fri, 10/18/2002 - 16:01
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This thread is dedicated to those little things we run into. It's hard to think of everything to tell a new person, and not every problem deserves its own thread. This thread is a collection of wisdom from those of us who have tried and truly learned from our experiences.
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Case Scenarios (Things That Come Up)
Such as this, something I've run into while posting a story on the game board:
Say you just wrote your story in the REPLY box. You preview it, find several glaring mistakes, and promptly fix them. You then might click PREVIEW again to see if you actually corrected them. (How many times have I corrected a mistake and, in the process, made three more?) There. Done. You give it a looksie, decide it's good, and click SUBMIT. Your story appears on the board.
All done, right?
Well, not necessarily. If you're obsessive, you might give it another read in its official, posted form. I find that I never really know if something is good to be read until it's posted; because once it's posted, Heather will rip it apart for grammar, and I become paranoid. Then all my mistakes glare back at me from the screen!
So, okay, you say to yourself, "I better click EDIT and fix that comma splice."
You spend a minute making it perfect. Then you're ready to click SUBMIT again, right?
Right.
Except, well, a paranoid person--not to name any names--will want to preview it again. Just in case.
Don't click PREVIEW from the edited page.
This is my advice. I've found that when you do, your final post will end up in a white box that says QUOTE above it. It looks terrible, and you look terrible in doing it, like you were trying to be all fancy-schmancy, when really you just made a mistake.
And sometimes it ends up giving you two posts. You'll get the hideous quoted post, then the "finished" post right below it.
And all the while you were just trying to keep Heather off your back. :lol: But you end up having to PM Heather asking her to fix it for you. *sigh*
Take it from a pro. A pro of silly blunders.
Case Scenarios (Things That Come Up)
Always write your story posts for the game board in a word processor. And save OFTEN.
Honestly, Paranoid Me saves every time I make a change, or every sixty seconds, whichever comes first. It might sound excessive, but you do not want to know the horror of writing a page of text--or ten pages of text--and have your computer freeze.
This is the reason you should not write your story directly into the REPLY box. You will lose everything you wrote; it's only a matter of time before it happens to you.
From your word processor (or notepad) you can cut and paste your writing to the REPLY box and, assuming you don't attempt the neurotic string of previews that I mentioned above, you can click SUBMIT.
There. Story's on the board. No loss, no pain, no sticking pencils in your brain.
Case Scenarios (Things That Come Up)
To give an advice of my own on what Sid said.
Sometimes one types up the post in the post box. You think that it is a short post so you just type it straight into the box. Then you see other people msning you as you are on the web and you reply, have a nice chat come back to your post and add something else, and time passes and you realise your short post has actually taken you a whole hour and one whole A4 side page. But you say, never mind, it's a master piece and you want to continue anywayz. Then you click the submit button.
The next screen that comes up is "enter your password screen". You sigh, and type in the info. Then you find out that instead of the post actually being posted a blank post box shows up for you to type your msg.
Yup, at that point you realise that you have lost your masterpiece. uh-oh, a whole hour lost! what to do?
Here's my advise. Just before you click on the submit button, highlight your entire text and hold "ctrl+c". This will temporaliy copy your post, so f you do lose it pressing submit and your login timing out, you can just hold "ctrl+v" to paste it back.
Hope this helps :D
Case Scenarios (Things That Come Up)
Here is some usless info for you...
if you are not using a shared computer, when you log in just tick Log me on automatically each visit and you shouldn't have any problems with ever being timed out or ever having to log in (until you delete your cookies and then realise it's been so long that you've typed your password that you've forgotten it)
LOGGING ON FROM AN OUTSIDE SOURCE
I've noticed that when I'm on a computer other than I own, I have difficulty logging on. I type in my name and password correctly, but it doesn't work. A computer guy would tell you how to fix this, but here is Sid's trial-and-error solution.
Ignore the usual LOG IN button. Try to view your profile. If that doesn't work, try to view your private messages. You will be asked to supply your name and password. It is through this roundabout method that I've been able to log in. For some reason, those log in boxes work, whereas the official log in box didn't.
A point of preference
Here's something that most people would consider trivial. I bring it up because I feel that reading fiction is a visual experience. A paragraph break, for instance, is important. The size of a paragraph is important. White space is important. It affects the mood of what you're reading.
I'm not a fan of my internet browser window being in full-screen (maximize) mode when I'm reading the game board. The paragraphs are stretched out to the right and left, and it actually affects my reaction to the story. If you are like me, you might not have considered that you can simply click the restore button at the top right of your screen (the two overlapping squares in-between the "-" and the "x"), which will give you a compressed version of the window and, therefore, the post.
Go ahead. Right now, give it a try and see how this text changes. Doesn't it feel like you're reading something tighter? It adds a refreshingly false sense of coherency, doesn't it? (If not, try adjusting the window borders to taste.)
I realize that this may seem obvious to some and, as stated, trivial. But if you haven't tried it already, see what you think. Thinner pages and columns give that feel that you're reading a book or a magazine, a cozy bedfellow, and at least for me it curtails that sense of agoraphobia that made me write this post in the first place.