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POSTING GUIDE

Content

The purpose of the Further Left Forum, Library, and Chat Room is to encourage support for oppressed people striking at causes of concerns as they see fit. The title word "Further" should be taken to emphasize process rather than position. We are interested more in where one might move than currently stand.

We welcome additions advancing our purpose. Adding is to accept what is and enlarge. It does not mean agreement but to grant value to what has been presented and offer more in relation that will stand on its own merit. That is what distinguishes discussion from debate based on targeted dispute.

Our focus is on external realities rather than which of us understand them best. We are not a competitive debating society where one scores by diminishing what has been said and thereby, no matter how subtly implied, the person saying it. Devaluation of our purpose, contributors, or their posts is detraction, not addition, and is discouraged. That holds for both the Forum and our Chat Room.

Anyone may comment on an existing Forum post by clicking the "Post a Comment" below it. Those from non team members are subject to approval. Acceptance will be based on whether they are additions to the forum purpose as above. Divergance of viewpoints within that will not be a factor but manner of presentation will be.

Forum comments of some individuals may be rejected out of hand. Causes, regardless of when or where exhibited, could be malicious disruption, threats, harassment, name calling, personal attack, impersonation, imitation, mimicking, bigotry, excessive gratuitous profanity, denigrating user personality, breaching anonymity, indication of security risk, or stance contrary to Forum purpose.

Team members post without prior approval but with expectation that they apply the above standards and frame input in a manner of discussion rather than debate. The following gradient can guide mindset and approach.

  1. Post initial topics referencing external situations and events.
  2. Comment on and expand content of an initial topic.
  3. Reference previous comments by expanding their content.
  4. Offer divergent views with reference to previous content.
  5. Reference other posters or depreciate previous content.
Posts low on that scale may be edited if feasable by removing personal or other post reference without changing substantial content. They may otherwise be rejected.

Internal Forum matters are just that, internal, and expected to remain so. Any received communications concerning operation will be forwarded to pertinent team members.

Those are the boundaries of our style. Any finding them overly constraining can avail themselves of other avenues. One would be to discuss concerns in our chat room, where a more relaxed personal style prevails. Failing that, they might be reminded the internet has sites for every mode and tickets to them are but a few clicks away.


Forum Posting Technique

An undesirable Forum coding quirk appears on some browsers, screen resolutions, and window sizes. The only solution is to minimize left column length and width. Left column post titles should have no more than 20 characters. By using the posting editor's HTML tab, the title can be continued by coding a post's first line with no preceding line break or any other in between text or graphics as

<h2>The Continued Title Text Here Can Be As Long As You Want</h2>

The shorter left column title and its first line continuance will print as one entity in the same style. The technique is specific to this blog and not for use on others. It will not work on comments.

The following have purpose of preserving style continuity: The first letter of each word of a post title should be capitalized and the others lower case. That includes title continuance as above. The default post font is black Trebochet MS formatted to left justify. That is preferred except for enhancements of internal post sections. Preferred paragraphing style is to separate them by single blank lines while keeping them short and to a single sub topic.

Graphics should not be loaded off the internet by linking to their URLs on the blogger graphic upload screen. That depends on them being present on a working linked site at the time of Forum viewing. They are better permanently stored on blogger itself. First acquire the picture on your own machine. Then choose blogger's graphic Browse button to upload.

Links to other sites in thread starting posts are best coded as

<a href="The external URL" target="_blank"><b>The link text</b></a>

The target="_blank" forces the link to be accessed in a new window rather than replacing the Forum's. It can be added using blogger's HTML tab. Inserting target="_blank" on comment links will not work but the <b> and </b> bolding will.

Text copied from online sources or word processors directly into blogger's new post Compose tab may not preserve line break spacing. A better way is to first screen copy it into a simple text editor such as Notepad and then edit, select, and copy it from there. Choose the HTML tab on blogger and paste the text into it. That will preserve line breaks and spacing and remove word processor or internet formatting code that may not be appropriate in blogger. You can then switch to the Compose tab to enhance text with blogger features.

The new blogger format allows afixing arbitrary catagorical lablels to posts to aid searching. That could be useful on a single or even few member blog, where a set of labels could be adheared to, It would become a mess however with the number of team members of divergent views that we enjoy. Labels will not be used on the Forum and members are asked not to insert them. Any that are will be edited out.