Help
This site is built on the MediaWiki system. Once you've created an account, you can edit most pages easily with the tabs at the top of each page. You may want to start by putting something in your own User and/or Talk pages -- once logged in, you'll see links for those in the upper-left corner, above the tabs. Commentary *about* pages, including "should this go here?" and the like, should go in the "discussion" pages rather than the main page, also reachable from the tabs. Comments to particular users should go in their Talk pages. (Any user's Talk page is reachable by way of the "discussion" tab on their User page.)
Important: If you want to put your E-mail address in your user or talk page, you should "defang" it, by writing it as "username (AT) example.com" or variations, rather than just "username@example.com". This will help avoid having spammers, and their robot page-scanners, from harvesting your address and flooding you with dubious offers, malware lures, and that sort of thing. Putting other people's E-mail addresses, (or worse, real-world contact information) into a Wiki without their permission is considered Evil, and likely to tick them off. Worse, it may also tick off the site owners!
In general, editing pages is pretty straightforward, and you can see how to do most simple edits by looking at the code in existing pages. Feel free to fix typos or add hints or tips in existing pages. Be warned that later users can likewise edit your contributions.... Wikipedia-style "edit wars" will be squelched by the admins! Avoid nasty language, including both hostility to other users, and cursewords in general.
Some particular hints:
- Whenever you edit a page, use the "Show Preview" button to check your work. You might not catch every error, but it will help.
- While editing pages, you have a toolbar directly above the edit box, which provides many of the commoner bits of formatting.
- A topic page on this wiki can be linked like this: [[Help]], or like [[Help|helpful hints]] if you want the link's text to be different from the page name. (That's a "vertical bar" character. Look for it on your keyboard.)
- Discussion pages are linked as [[Talk:Help]].
- When putting something into a discussion or talk page, "sign" your comments by using the "signature" button in the toolbar, or typing --~~~~ after your comment. Please don't do this on topic pages! Exception: Please do "sign" anything you post on the Glitches or Suggestions pages.
- User pages are linked as: [[User:TheirName]]. User Talk pages are [[User talk:Theirname]].
- If you create a link to a page that doesn't exist yet, the link will show in red. If you were trying to link to an existing page, this is a quick way to spot typos in preview. If you click on such a "red link", you'll be able to create the page -- in fact, that's how we usually start new pages!
- Page names can have spaces in them, and it doesn't matter if you start them with a capital letter. However, capitals in the middle of page names are significant, so [[General tips]] won't work -- you need to use [[General Tips]]. (This is annoying, but that's how the wiki software works.)
- For links to other sites, just typing a URL into a page will linkify it. If you want to use a link with descriptive text such as this link to Google, do it like this: [http://www.google.com this link to Google]. Notice that, unlike a similar link within the wiki, you do not use a "|" (vertical bar) before the description, and you use only one set of square brackets.
- A table of contents will magically appear when your page has at least four headers.
- By clicking on the MediaWiki icon (to the lower right on every page), you can go to their extensive site, where you can search for obscure details. The following pages are particularly useful:
Have fun!
