Welcome New Users

From dKosopedia

Table of Contents

Recommended Links

Frequently Asked Questions

Highlighted FAQ Areas/Rules for polite conversation-

• Mission Statement
• Recommending Diaries and Comments
• Diary Rules
• Diary Deletion
• Controversial Diaries
• Comments
• Dealing with Trolls
• Text Formatting
• Image Formatting

I have written some diaries you may find useful-

• Speed Reading dKos, about How to Read a Lot of Diaries.
• dKos Censorship?, about How Things Disappear.

Other Useful Diaries-

• jotter's High Impact Diaries- 150 Diaries a day, ranked by Impact, and other daily statistics.
• Useful Diaries in the FAQ- A collection of useful Diaries.
• See That Caps Lock Key on Your Keyboard? by PatsBard.
• Diaries 101: Let's Share Writing Tips :) by OrangeClouds115.
• Please Stop Biting The Newbies by kraant.
• How do YOU dKos? by Yellow Canary.

Here are some other Diaries that address the needs of new users-

• New Users Guide To DKos, By The Pony Express by buhdydharma.
• Not buhdydharma's New User's Guide to dKos by ek hornbeck.
• DailyKos 101: The Basics by theleftknew.
• Join Me In Welcoming New Members and Readers by Darksyde.
• Hey, Newbie! by georgia10.
• An Old Coot to Newbies and Fellow Codgers: Let's Talk Site Functionality by folkbum.

Here are some older takes on what the well informed user should know-

• Soj's Old-Tyme FAQ and Jamboreee by Soj.
• Suggested dKos Community Norms by pastordan.
• On community by kos.
• FAQ version 1.x

    Diaries in the Welcome New Users Series.

Contents 1 Recommended Links 2 Introduction 3 Reading and Recommending

Introduction

Hi, ek hornbeck here. Yes, that one.

For now this is just going to be an outline of a project I have in mind- to create a 'New Users' guide for dKos to supplement the existing FAQ.

What distinguishes this project from the FAQ is I intend to concentrate much more on how to work the controls as opposed to the more, ah, controversial topics of polite conversation.

Welcome New Users will be divided into short, specific, and separate descriptions of common dKos tasks like these-

• Reading and Recommending 11/3/06
• Posting Comments 11/10/06
• Fancy Formatting 11/17/06
• Posting Diaries 11/24/06
• Editing Diaries 12/1/06
• Searches 12/8/06
• Tags 12/15/06
• History 12/22/06
• Speed Reading 12/29/06
• Power User Tricks 1/5/07

Those of you who are familiar with my work will recognize some of these as topics I have addressed before. They will be revisited and rewritten to conform to current site design (though I think they have stood the test of time pretty well).

My target audience is users of less than 3 months experience, so things that only a Trusted User sees will not be covered, nor will there be much discussion of folksonomy at all.

This project was originally envisioned as a series of diaries, replacing the 'New Users Guide to dKos' diaries started by bhudydharma and continued by me. As I re-read my last version I came to the sudden realization that it was a great big honking load of material to try to cram into just one diary. It took too long, and a very important goal of that type of piece is to be friendly and encourage new users to ask questions.

So I'm going to tiny it up and post the permanent bits here with links to the original diaries.

Completion date? Right now it seems like a lot of work, I hope I've picked pieces of managable size. We'll see. It will also be my first major work in the dKosopedia interface, so while I'm pretty sure the links will go up quickly enough, the diary translations may take a while.

Will I accept help? Oh, all I can get.

ek hornbeck 10/18/06

Reading and Recommending