Alumnislambook talk:Community Portal
From Alumnislambook
Any Shelfer who earned the title "Regular" cannot deny that the AOL Book Shelf, 1995 through 2004, was an exciting, stimulating, provocative, demeaning, profane, glorious place to sign on and spend some hours doing your shtick. Nobody held a gun to our heads to get us to sign on. Clicking the link to get into the Shelf was to open one's self to an exciting potential for mostly safe uncertainty. While there was a general theme, in that most of us were mammalian and terrestrial in origin, you just never knew for cetain what was going to happen during one's stint there. You could count on the extremes, love-hate-honor-evil, but for most of us it was the geniune camaraderie of like-minded individuals united in a common cause: unscripted entertainment. We celebrated that we could be surprised.
There are some who never made any real life friends from the Shelf, and to those few souls we ask, What were you thinking?
Zaglossus responds:
Hi 71.165.254.91--
Just a few of my thoughts on what the Portal page might look like, should anyone want to change it around:
- The reason I added the line about "...originally set up by Zaglossus, it is not by him..." is because the link coming from the current community blog says "Shelfwiki by Zaglossus," which probably gives the wrong impression to some hardheads, who might reject participating due to my implied authorship.
- I've tried to make it clear that you don't need to register, or go through any other hoops in order to edit the wiki.
- Since a lot of people seem to be new to wikis, and have some trouble finding their way around the site, let alone editing or formatting, some sort of links to the most common destinations like ScreenName List, etc seem like a good idea.
- In my own edits, I have so far been trying to avoid using the ISP provider or specific name of the forum we used to frequent, since, for all I know, some of the ScreenNames may still be live. That someone could use the information here to spoof somebody else-- or even add them to a spam list-- might be over-cautious. This is an editorial notion that should be discussed.
- A To-Do List might give editors who would like to play with the site some ideas where to start. A Main Page, with a Table of Contents is one thing that would help give the wiki a backbone to build upon. So would a very basic "Editing Help" page.
- An FAQ about the wiki, including how-to tips, general etiquette, community-generated editorial preferences (such as the ISP thing), how to register, how to upload images, how to follow the changes, how to use the Discussion and History pages, etc.
ZHS
