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Frequently Asked Questions





Why isn't my signup working?   top

The signup process sends a confirmation email to you once you've filled in and submitted your information. This confirmation email has a verification URL inside of it that you must click before your account will be activated.


Are SlickerTalk and SlackerTalk two different forums?   top

No, they are simply two different skins for the same website. They share the same central database, and the artwork and intro text is all that really separates them. The goal of SlickerTalk is to disguise SlackerTalk so it doesn't look so obvious that you're on a chat forum. :)


What's cool (and what's not cool) on this forum?   top

One benefit of the community running its own forum is that we get to set our own rules. However, we have to be careful when sculpting those rules to protect people from personal attacks, and also to ward off trolling and other potentially offensive behaviour. While I'd like to say that "The first rule of Slacker Club is that there are no rules", I can't. So here's a short list:

  1. Be respectful of fellow posters. Humorous jabs and shivs are okay, of course, but everyone has their own line in the sand, and it falls upon you to avoid crossing it.
  2. Sensitive topics, such as potential spoilers, should be put inside the body of posts, with a subject line indicitive of the spoileriffic payload. In the future, a special spoiler-zone board might be created to loosen this stuff up (especially for sports games, award shows, and other collective events), but for now, this rule stands.
  3. Swearing is fine, and linking to most NSFW material is fine (although I'd appreciate it if it was labelled as such), but egregious abuse of this privilege could result in the suspension of your account(s).


RSS feeds. What are they, and how do I use them?   top

RSS feeds are specially-crafted XML documents that provide a succinct glimpse at the latest activity on a site. In SlackerTalk's case, there are two kinds of RSS feeds:

  • The main feed. This feed, found on the sidebar, provides your RSS reader with a list of the most recent top-level posts on SlackerTalk. This allows you to see what the IM of the message is, usually in much the same way that an email program works, and some RSS readers will even directly link to the forum from within their preview window, allowing you to see the latest replies to the thread.
  • The ego feed. A variant of the main feed, this allows you to monitor a specific username (either yours or someone else's) for the latest replies to the user's comments. To access the feed, simply take the URL from the main feed, and add this parameter onto the end: ?username=[username]
    For example, to monitor for replies to my own posts, I would use this RSS url:

      http://www.slackertalk.com/rss.php?username=grayman

There are many RSS reader services around, from Google Reader to Mozilla Thunderbird to the NewsGator service. On my desktop, I use Mozilla Thunderbird, and on my iPhone I use the NewsGator service via the NetNewsWire iPhone app.


Does Dr. Tron capture posts from SlackerTalk?   top

No. Dr. Tron is a separate project specifically created to archive the original TickerTalk boards from HSX. SlackerTalk has its own seach interface, called Dr. S. Talk.


Why is Dr. Tron so out of date?   top

The Dr. Tron crawl script was disabled when the original "Orange" changeover experiment occurred, and was not re-enabled for the fall-back 'HSX Classic'. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is that a large subset of the community did not want the crippled/lame-duck forum to be catalogued. HSX has recently launched a (working, not-ugly) upgrade to their site, which probably breaks the Dr. Tron scraping script, so odds are low of it being re-enabled any time in the future, unless there turns out to be a large demand for it.


The Internet has offended my delicate sensibilities. How can I killfile someone?   top

Some effort has been made to port the old Killfile greasemonkey script to ST, and you may be able to ask around and find a working copy of it. Barring that, just keep asking Beryllium and he might implement something on the site to enable this functionality.


Why can't I see my stats, or mark posts as Favourites?   top

In order to see your stats or flag posts, you have to first log in - unlike most sites, though, SlackerTalk doesn't currently have a traditional "log in" page; instead, you just have to go to make a post, and put a checkmark next to the "Save this stuff for next time" message.

If you don't have anything you want to post about, you can even just check the box and post a message with no subject - this will show an error message, but you can safely ignore it and proceed to the Your Stats page after you've gone back to the board view.


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(Please do not use an important password for this site; the cookie-based information saving system is inherently insecure for the time being. Disposable passwords only, please.)