Return to The Bronze: Beta
Table of Contents:
Answers:
-
Can I use html tags in my post and if so what tags does the board support?
- Yes. We plan to support any pure formatting html
tags that doesn't affect the complete look and feel of the board.
Currently these tags include: <a>, <b>, <big>, <bold>, <br>, <center>,
<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>, <i>,
<li>, <ol>, <p>, <s>, <small>, <spoiler>, <strike>, <sub>, <sup>, <tt>, <u>,
<ul>. We are constantly reviewing all posts for other tags that
posters tend to use and will add support for them as we discover them.
We have created a page with examples on how each of these tags work which
you can get to by clicking here.
-
I have information that I would like to post but am
not sure I should because it gives away (or spoils) the ending of...
- Fortunately we have a feature on the board to allow you
to post information that may be considered a spoiler by others. To
hide this information simply use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags around the
text you wish to post. The text in question will be posted using the
same color as the background essentially hiding it from view. A
user that wishes to reveal the content can simply highlight the blank area
and reveal the text.
-
For what information and for how long should I show information as "spoilers"?
- Everyone sees the episodes at different times and days
and what may not be a spoiler to one person maybe a spoiler to another, so
when in doubt play it safe and use the spoiler font. Also please label what
it is you are spoiling (future episodes, rumors, etc.) so people will know
what they are getting into.
-
What are all these empty gaps in some people posts? And what are these spoiler things I keep hearing about?
- A spoiler is a piece of information posted by a user that
may ruin an television show, movie, book, or other production for a person
who may not have read or watched the item in question. This happens a
lot for TV shows as people on the East coast of the united stats can watch a
show on TV 3 hours before a person on the West coast. People in other
countries may even have to wait weeks and or months. As a courtesy to
other folks, posted may choose to hide this spoiling information by
utilizing the <spoiler> tag. The content will be hidden until the
reader reveals it by highlighting the region to reveal the text.
- Why can't I post again?
- Posting Limits: This board has a one post
per 2 to 5 minute rule to conserve bandwidth and to lightly enforce the 4 post
per hour posting limits the old Bronze community lived by. The post
limit can be changed from time to time to help with bandwidth issues.
-
Can I keep someone else from using my screen name?
- Yes. As a new feature we now allow you to register
your screen name so that no one else is allowed to post using your identity.
In order to do so all you have to do is follow your user name with a colon
(':') and your password. For example --> Name:Password. The
first time you enter your password it will be saved in the system and the
board will not allow any more posts with that user name unless the password
is specified. Please keep this in mind. This means every post
from this point on using this name must have a password assigned.
Other notes, if your screen name goes unused for more than 180 days the
registration will be removed and anyone is free to use that name at that
time. Additionally, your name and password combination must be less
than 40 characters in total. And last but certainly not least.
Please keep in mind your password is entered, transmitted, and stored in
plain text. Please make sure you select a reasonable secure
password but DO NOT use a password you are using for other secure passwords.
I do not want you bank passwords, PINS, Social security numbers. We
have the ability to see all these passwords so don't give us anything
compromising. Also user names passwords are all case sensitive.
Of course since the colon is now used as a delimited it can no longer be
used as part of your name. Users can still post anonymously
without passwords assuming they are using a name that has not been
previously reserved.
- Can I change my password?
- Yes. Simply enter your old and new password when
posting using the following format --> Name:OldPassword:NewPassword.
The old password will be verified and the new one will be stored.
Again all the password restrictions given above still apply.
Additionally you are not required to make a post to actually assign or
change your password. Simply use the preview post button and then hit
back and your password is changed. When our advanced features
are deployed this procedure will change a bit to be a bit more user
friendly.
-
Why am I being told my password is incorrect?
- This can happen for many reasons. First off, passwords
and user names are case sensitive. Please verify you have typed your
password exactly as when you registered it. Secondly since we are
using the colon (':') as a delimiter, if you accidentally used that
character in your name you may have accidentally locked your self out from
posting. If this happens or you may have forgotten your password please drop
us a line and we'll fix you up ASAP. Unfortunately, sometimes you may
be denied posting because your name has been taken by another user and have
reserved it for themselves. Of course if this name had been registered
in bad faith, get in touch with us immediately so we can resolve the issue.
Bad faith is defined as someone who registers your name to confuse others by
speaking on your behalf or knowingly registering a name to prevent another
user from legitimately using a identity they are known by other Bronzers as.
- Can I edit a post I made?
- Yes. If you are a registered user and you have
protected your screen name with a password as described above you may edit
your own posts. Now there is one caveat. You may only edit posts
from the same IP address that you made the original post from. This is
the only way we have right now to ensure the person who is editing the post
is the writer of it. For dial up users their will impact you as you
wont be able to edit a post if you sign off your ISP and dial back in.
-
What is a dropped tag, and what should I do if I see one?
- A dropped tag is in reference to a users post where they
elect to use some html tags listed above but forget to include the closing
tag which is required by a great majority of html tags in order to tell the
browser where to stop applying the format. An example of this is the
the <b> tag which make text bold. If the user fails to close the
bold tag all text on the page below that point would appear bold.
Since the board puts all new post at the top, it would affect all the post
posted prior to that one till the point in time the page was archived.
Great care has been taken in the implementation of the board to close any
dropped tags we can detect. But occasionally one tag may slip through.
If you see this, please contact us at the addresses below and make sure to
include the offending post time stamp/IP address.
- Why does my post appear "long and skinny?"
- If you type continuously in the post box you should
notice your typing should wrap around if you type more text than the box is
wide. This is ok in most browsers as the text is process normally and
carriage returns are only inserted at points where the user actually hits
return. However some browsers decide to put a carriage return at each
point where the text will wrap. This causes a post that appears to
have only 3 to 5 words a line. For some users this is cool for
other this may be unintentional. On rare occasions, the posted may
have inadvertently hit return as the approached the end of the post box.
This of course will hard code the returns. On other occasions, a user
may be copying the text to post form another document and or editor (i.e.
the wanted a spell check). If this is a case there is a change the
text may have inadvertent carriage returns. The big problem is, there
is nothing we can do about it on the server end. By this point we have
no way of telling whether the carriage return inserted is one put there by
the browser or one actually entered by the user. If this happens
to you frequently, our recommendation is to go into the preview post mode
and make your post there. The box is much wider on that page and
therefore you post should appear to be wider. We have yet to determine
which browsers do this the most but we are hearing the AOL browser does this
occasionally. If this happens to you when you are cutting and pasting
text, please use the edit and or the preview functions to make sure the text
is in the alignment you desire.
-
Why do you enforce the posting board rules
differently from the old board?
- Actually their is one point that must be
clarified first. The old board had no enforcement of its posting
policy. There was an accepted rule that posters are limited to four
post per hour. But anyone could have posted continuously (at the mercy
of the bronze community however.) Ok now that that's clear, the main
reason we implemented posting limits was for technical reasons. Of
course I can name bandwidth as the number 1 reason, but the real
reason is that we needed to also solve the problem of accidental repeat
posts. A user that accidentally hits the submit post, or
gets an error after a successful post but a filed reply transmit, or someone
reloading on the CGI redirect page would have had their post duplicated.
We solved that problem with the time filter requirement. Of course it
got the added affect of loosely enforcing the policy of the old Bronze
community. And yes for the mathematically inclined you ca assume that
yes you can technically post up to 12 to 20 times an hour. On the old board you
could have technically posted as frequently as you can type. We do not
intend to change the intentions of the Bronze community however. We
will leave it up to you as community members to decide what's appropriate.
We'd prefer to only implement restrictions on users that are technical
requirements. I hope that's an acceptable explanation to all.
-
How often does the site archive, and why is it
different from the old board?
- The site archives every 256 posts. We had to differ
from the old Bronze way as we needed to control bandwidth use. If we
limit the max size of the board at any time to a fixed amount of posts we
guarantee that the maximum size of the page will be pseudo constant.
This should benefit both us at the server side so we don't monopolize our
pipe to the internet at our web host. It should benefit the client as
you wont have to suffer the download of a board that is 1.5 megs in size.
Our number of 256 was selected to keep the max download between 128k and
256k.
- What time zone is the board on?
- The board is using GMT time which is considered the
universal time. This is 5 hours ahead of EST in the winter and 4 hours
ahead of EDT in the summer. It is 8 hours ahead of PST in the winter
and 7 hour in the summer. We are planning on having the clock localize
it self in a future release.
-
I've got a question, suggestion, complaint, like, dislike, or other
general feedback?
- Great. I definitely want to hear about it!
I love feedback. Especially the negative ones. Hey but don't
leave out the positive ones either. Now where to send it. Well
I'd recommend two ways. 1. If you want to make your feedback public
post it on the board. Others may have the same idea as yours or like
the idea just as much. There is power in numbers when requesting
features. 2. Contact me, Artie by emailing me at
artie@bronzebeta.com.
(Don't tell any spammers that email address ok! ;) This is the most
direct way to submit feedback that I am guaranteed to read, and I
try my best to respond to everyone. Now don't get me wrong I am
scanning the board to make sure all suggestions on there are taken into
consideration. But the best way to ensure a response from me is via
email.
- What does the term "Beta" in the board name mean?
- The Beta in the title is to mean the second Bronze. If you consider the original, but now defunct, Bronze as Alpha then this could be considered the Beta board. This term beta is not to be meant to be used as it is known in the software domain as pre release software.
- What's the deal with this 13 year old rule?
- Pretty standard now. United States Federal laws no
web site can solicit information from a person under the age of 13. We support this federal law as a matter of principle
completely.
- Why the heck did we do this?
- Why not do it? :) We thought it
would be fun and it really sucks that the WB pulled the Bronze before the
UPN site was deployed. Corporate politics caused the 5 year old Buffy
community to fragment. We hoped that a familiar replacement home would
help to hold the community together during the transition period.
-
I know some perl, can I help develop the board?
- We are going to have to respectfully decline. We do
acknowledge there are some bright programmers out there whose contributions
would probably be enormous. However the scope of this project is too
small to be partitioned up to a set of distributed developers.
Additionally we get into legality of code ownership and use issues.
We'd much rather avoid any conflicts of interest.
-
What is the PBP Committee involvement in this board? And how did Artie
get involved?
- No this is not
an officially sanctioned PBP Committee function, although that conclusion is certainly logical to draw considering
since 2 of the people (Occido and Phoenix) who wanted an immediate restoration are also involved with the party. I
personally have taken this on this as a personal project as I have been looking
to do a project like this for quite some time. Secondly my involvement on this
project is also as a favor to my friend Phoenix whom I have been developing CGI
scripts for her for many years now. When the news of the old Bronze broke,
Phoenix and OzLady were in a conversation and immediately decided that this
should be done. Within minutes Phoenix IM'ed me and asked me, "Is this
feasible?" I responded with a resounding "Yes, this is a piece of cake." By
Wednesday we had a working demo on my home pc, Thursday about 25 personal
friends were visiting the site. By Friday morning one post was made on a
threaded board and you crazy displaced bronzers began bombarding the site. :) It
was an instant hit. By Friday night I had over 100 unique visitors on my home pc
and by Saturday morning the traffic was so much my PC couldn't handle the load.
So Saturday noon, the site was move to the pbparty.com site as a temporary
measure (since Phoenix is the webmaster of that site and it was the only site
under her control that can handle the Board while its still under development
and the final host can be determined and setup).
-
I would like to contact the cast or crew of Buffy and Angel. How can I
do so?
- The best way to reach the cast or crew of the show is
through the networks that air their programs. Here are those
addresses:
Cast/Crew Member's Name
c/o Buffy the Vampire Slayer
United Paramount Network
11800 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90025
Cast/Crew Member's Name
c/o Angel
The WB Network
4000 Warner Boulevard
Burbank, California 91522