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.
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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 within it.
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 Techniques
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 discussed below. The default post font is black 12 point Trebochet MS with line formatting set 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.
Text copied from online sources or word processors directly into blogger's 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.
An undesirable Forum coding quirk appears on some browsers, screen resolutions, and window sizes. Overly wide left column content disrupts Forum formatting. The solution is to minimize left column width. To that end, post titles should have no more than 20 characters. By using the posting editor's HTML tab, the title can be continued below it in the following manner. Add the code below as the posts first line with no preceding line between, either blank or containing text or graphics.
<h2>The Continued Title Text Here Can Be As Long As You Want</h2>
The shorter left column title and its continuance will print as one entity in the same style. This technique is specific to Forum post titles. It will not work on comments added to forum posts or other blogs.
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. A graphic will always load at the top of the post. You may have to cut and paste from there to where you want it in the post.
When posting videos it is better to take them off their source, such as YouTube, rather than a blog where they may have otherwise appeared. YouTube videos showing on another blog will have a small cursor roll over "Watch On YouTube" pop up at the lower right of the video. Click that to go to the video on YouTube. Start and then pause the video there. Click the small "embed" box in the line of choices that appear below the video.
There will be an option for setting the screen size at the bottom of the embed code. Just one of those sizes suits the Forum, that is the second box from the left, 640 x 390. Larger will be too much so on some browsers and screen resolutions. Smaller makes it impossible for others to recover the original YouTube for further embedding elsewhere.
Right click on the embed code after selecting size and choose "Select all". Right click again on the highlighted code and select "Copy". Then paste that code in the Forum editorīs HTML tab editing space where you want the video to appear in the post.
Links to other sites in Forum 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 open in a new window or tab, depending on browser settings, 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 codes will.
Our 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 posts and members are asked not to insert them. Any that are will be edited out.