OK, I'm finally ready to get this FAQ up. I'm going to continually edit it here until it's ready. Can you all please help me write it? Point out anything that could be problematic here.

GUIDELINES

• SUBMITTING LINKS
  
  
  1. Please create an original headline and especially an original description of the story. Try to be witty if you can (or otherwise interesting). We don't want to just be a news categorizer, we want to digest it for others in an interesting way. This is especially important when you are picking a link from the feeds page and the form populates for you.
     
     
  2. Please check your grammar carefully.
     
     
  3. Please always give descriptive tags with each story that match the content of the story.
     
     
  4. Please always include a picture with the story. After typing in your story tags, Plime can try to match up your story with an image in it's library with similar tags. You can add an original one by just linking to the image. Plime will resize it and import it automatically.
     
     
  5. Only include photo-realistic images. Do not include hand drawn clip art. It looks cheesy. The only exception would be company logos. Your images must relate to the story in some way, not to the website they were found at. Your images must be completely work-safe.
     
     
  6. Post the URL for the actual article, not to a place that links or redirects to the article. You can credit the place where you found the article in the "source" field.
     
     
  7. Plime is a news and interesting link filter, not a web directory. Only post links to destination pages within a website that have actual content on them, not to the homepage of a website. An example would be linking to a specific new movie in imdb.com, instead of just linking to "www.imdb.com".
     
     
  8. Don't link to anything that requires registration or is not safe for work, without indicating so in the headline.
     
     
  9. Don't spam us with links that directly benefit you. Share for the sake of sharing, only.
  
  
  
• USER LEVELS & USER VOTING
  
  
  1. Voting on users helps them move up and down in user levels. A person's user level is represented in a star next to their name. To rate someone go to their profile page.
     
     
  2. The higher a person's user level, the more power they carry when performing site actions (such as voting on other users, or determining a links' popularity). Most importantly, users who reach higher levels can perform administrative functions that others cannot (like changing the structure of the tree, colorizing a page, editing posts or changing permission levels for an area).
     
     
  3. You can change your rating of someone. You can also rate them multiple times. Your previous rating will be deleted when you do and your new one will be added. This is important because voting at a later date probably means your vote will carry a different level of power than when you first voted.
     
     
  
  
  
• SITE BEHAVIOUR
  
  
  1. Be cool and respectful to others. Pretend that Plime is a giant coffee bar, full of interesting people you'd love to meet. Imagine that you're walking into that bar, and all eyes turn to you. How would you act in real life? We expect you to act the same way here.
     
     
  2. If someone has a difference of opinion with you, politely agree to disagree and drop the subject. Your peers are going to see the person who needed to get the last word in and vote their dissapointment accordingly.
     
     
  3. Please don't use (really) foul language.
     
     
  
  
  
• CHANGING THE SITE
  
  
  1. At this stage, Plime is just a sapling. You don't know better than anyone else what Plime really needs. To that end, you should not make ANY changes to the site structure without first discussing it with other users.
     
     
  2. When deciding whether or not to branch a category off into subcategories, the rule of thumb is how active that category is. If the categorie's forums are not thriving, you should not be branching it.
     
     
  3. The only time to delete a category is when it was clearly added out of vandalism, or without the consensus of the users of the plime.
     
     
  4. A category's colors and language should never be changed without good reason. A good reason to change colors or language would be that most users agree that the change should be made.
     
     
  5. If there's a change you would like to make, you must first ask others what they think in that category's forum. Give the thread time for quite a few people to have time to read it. If there is not a sufficient response, or there is a signficant amount of people opposed, you may not make the changes. More weight should be given to people with higher user levels.
     
     Once a consensus has been reached in that category, you must post a follow up thread in the highest level (Plime.com) forum asking if there is anyone with a valid reason to oppose the change. If there is no opposition within a reasonable time period, you may make the change.
     
     
  
  
  

Thank you very much.

So what is the point of the tags? Is it so some one looking for a certain story can enter key words to find it?

Yes. That will be the point eventually. It's also to help link content together, like links to images, where the tags are shared.

I'm bumping this... Can you all please help me write it? Point out anything that could be problematic here.

So if you vote someone a 4 now and then you go up a couple levels yourself. Would you want to go back and vote for that peson with a 4 again (if that's still how you felt) so that your new vote would carry more weight in the persons ranking?

You could do that, yes. I will be doing away with the star system for users and just do a "thumbs up / thumbs down" either way.

Note to self - watch grammer.

About the thumbs up/thumbs down way of voting.
Would that not make it hard hard to have an proper opinion. For instance, i might think someone is a bit of a ninny but not quite enough to give them a thumbs down. At the moment you can give them a 3.

Just a thought.

And with a thumbs up/down system you can just not vote. Same thing.

I may be over complicating it but if ive already given someone a thumbs up I might only want to nudge em down a bit for something mildly prattish. Whereas I might want to knock somebody right down for being nasty.

Like I say I might be over complicating it.

So basically, remove a vote of confidence, instead of outright lowering them. I understand...

Exactly.
The stars also allow for more variation between user ratings. For example, I may have four thumbs down and ten thumbs up. Another user may have exactly the same so we would look exactly the same. With the star system, theres more chance of results differing.
Over time and as your database of members grows I think this will matter.

In re FAQ:Under user voting, #2 repeats first sentence of #1.
USER VOTING
1. Rating users helps them move up and down in levels. To rate someone go to their profile page.
2. Rating users helps them move up and down in levels.

Could add under 'Site Behaviour'
"watch your language as this is a site
for all kinds of people and it's just
plain nice not to cuss"? (:

Can the FAQ include a synopsis of how you increase/decrease levels?

For example, right now I'm a 3. How did I get there and what do I need to become a 4?

Maybe I'm way off on this one, but I think having too much info in the digest of a link is a bad thing. If you include a full synopsis of the story in the digest then in many cases there's no reason to click the link, and if you don't click the link the story doesn't become popular, if stories don't have regularly changing popularity then the front page becomes stale and people wont have to check back and or refresh often to see new stories meaning less traffic to the site. Less traffic to the site is a bad thing (I guess).

The in-depth digest thing works if you are voting for the link to judge popularity, but not IMO if you are using clicks to judge it.

I agree. I do want a witty one liner, or something which encourages the user to want to read the full story (but is not innacurate).

I guess this is kind of what icepigs is asking for, but to be a little more specific..

How about a list in the FAQ that tells us exactly what is gained with each level? Like, levels 1-2 can do this and this, and once you reach level 3 you can do this and that, etc.

I realize that it's all outlined in the settings pages, but it might be nice to be able to look over it in the FAQ, and be familiar with that before you get to the settings pages.

The settings are plime and item specific though. Everything just started off at a default for right now, but once someone edits the access levels for a plime it can be totally different. They can make it that a level 1 can edit the colors of the baseball plime, for example.

Oh wow, okay, I didn't know that. I've found the access page now.

No problem :) That's why this place needs documentation.

Jax, when submitting a link, could there be a box to check warning of pop-ups? Or ask people to warn of them in the description? I've clicked on a few links and was quite annoyed by pop-ups.