not affect win/mac machines -->

nested tables... -->

Welcome to Everything

E2 Quick Start

Don't know what
this site's about? Don't understand what's going on? Can't
instinctively act on your primitive aggression? Check out the Everything FAQ (or) Everything University to learn more!

Welcome to Everything2. E2 is a complicated place, and what you don't know may cause you trouble. You'll be a lot happier if you make a good first impression, so here are a few tips to help you get off to a good start by avoiding some innocent mistakes commonly made by new users.

• Your First Writeup

  1. Before adding a writeup to E2, ask yourself whether others will find it interesting.
     If not, you should find something else to write about. A lot of
     brand-new users assume that we'll all be fascinated by their personal
     lives, but they turn out to be mistaken. They learn that the hard way: Editors delete that stuff.
     It's rough, but we don't want a database full of aimless navel-gazing.
     We have "daylogs" as a quarantine area for diary entries. There's one
     every day, and they're always linked from the front page. The title is
     always the current date in the following format: January 15, 2002, for example.

     Whatever you write about, tell us all about it. One line isn't enough. We'd like to know more. Don't just tell us that Bob's House of Botulism is a restaurant: Tell us where it is, tell us what it's like, and throw in some context (is it the best restaurant in Lymphoma Falls, IA? If so, what's wrong with the others?). If you're adding a writeup to a node that has a lot of writeups already, read the others first because your information may have been added by someone before you got there.

  2. Make hard links. You can't link to outside URLs, but you can link to anything on Everything2. Some people here get hostile if you don't do that, because the whole point is that everything here is linked to other things. It's easy: Just put square brackets around words and phrases, like so (this is also an example of stuff that only belongs in "daylogs"):

     My
     job at [McDonald's] is depressing because a [giant frog] lives in the
     [fryer]. His name is Anthony, and he ate three [customer]s just last
     week. Their anguished cries haunt me still, but I got to eat their food
     so it wasn't a total loss. The frog knows all the words to "[Bohemian
     Rhapsody]". He has the voice of an angel.
     

     When the writeup is displayed, "McDonald's", "giant frog", and the other bracketed text will become links to other E2 nodes, like so: McDonald's, giant frog. Link things that matter.
     Linking articles and prepositions is moronic. Link to related concepts
     that might interest the reader and to things the reader might need to
     look up. Link all titles, names of authors and rock bands, etc. Use
     your head.

  3. Spelling and grammar count. Proper capitalization is important. You must
     use apostrophes in contractions. You may not agree, but a lot of people
     here care about doing things right. You will never convince them that
     it's better to do things wrong. It is especially important to spell your links correctly, because if they're misspelled they won't lead anywhere. For example: There is already a node for McDonald's, but there is no node for MacDonolds.
     Nobody likes a link that doesn't go where it should. On the other hand,
     it's great to link correctly to nodes that don't exist yet, because some day they will exist and then your writeup will be prepared.

  4. Formatting is a good idea. If you don't know HTML, you can at least separate your paragraphs by putting a "paragraph tag" at the beginning of each one:

     <p>This is a [paragraph].

When the time comes to learn more, you can read E2 HTML tags : Quick Start. Don't just put a close-paragraph (</p>) tag at the end of each paragraph, without first having the open-paragraph (<p>)
tag at the begining. That's broken HTML and some web browsers don't
tolerate it as well as others. If you get lost, you may wish to try Magical Text Formatter, which will create a good deal of the HTML for you. Your Scratch Pad is a good place to test formatting and then you can ask your mentor to take a look at it for you before posting. You can also ask the chatterbox general chatterbox crowd - but be prepared to face anonymous strangers if you do that. XHTML

is, you probably should never, ever, put a slash (<tt>"/"</tt>) in any of your HTML tags at all. -->

Read it again before you submit it. You'll catch a lot of errors that way. If you get into that habit, you'll do much better here.

After Your First Writeup

1. Your masterpiece is complete, but nobody seems to care or Your masterpiece is complete and somebody voted it down. That happens to me, too. You may be angry and feel a need to complain in the Chatterbox (that little chat thing on the right-hand side of this page), but that's a bad idea: Stoicism is admired here. You won't make any friends by complaining. Here's what you can do: It's okay to ask nicely for help.
   Don't just blurt out your question in the Chatterbox though, send a
   private msg to a friend asking for assistance. People will understand
   and try to help. The format for private msgs is detailed below in item
   #2. Don't have any friends here yet? Send the msg to an editor or god,
   you can determine who they are because they have the "$" and "@" next
   to their names in the "Other Users" list.

2. Maybe there's a message in the Chatterbox with a checkbox next to it.
   When that happens, it's a private message directed to you by another
   user. Nobody but you can see it. You can reply privately by using the "/msg" command in the Chatterbox:

   /msg wharfinger I swear to God, Mick Jagger was in the Beatles! He really was!

   If you click the checkbox before you send your reply, the message to you will disappear. If the message is a suggestion or a correction, they're not being mean. They're being helpful. Here's more information about the Chatterbox: E2 FAQ: Chatterbox

We haven't covered everything, but you don't need to know everything
right away. This should be enough to get you started. You should read
the Everything FAQ too, but it's more fun to play than to read the instructions. Have fun.