"Thick" Lookup Information
Advanced Navigation
User Pages
Every user has a User Page. There is a link to this page in the menu sidebar. The User Page contains a collection of links gathering all of the diaries and all of the comments written by that user. The 'My Profile' tab on that page is the place to change all of your preferences. The User Page is also where you can edit your blogroll. To do this, go to the 'Blogroll' tab of your user page, and fill in URLs and titles for the sites which you wish to add to your roll. These sites will then appear on your user page and in all of your diaries.

From your User Page, you can also add a signature, a short bit of text which will be automatically appended to all of your comments. This can be set by going to the 'My Profile' tab and clicking on the 'Account Info' link. The signature field takes HTML code, so if you wish, you can embed links. It is not a good idea to put images in your signature; besides the visual clutter, it's very unfriendly to people on slow net connections.

Hotlist
The hotlist, found under the Tools sidebar, is a place to store links to diaries that you want to refer back to. Next to the title of every diary is a  ; clicking this icon will add that diary to your hotlist for future reference. Clicking the 'Subscribe' link next to a diary author's name will automatically add future diaries by that author to your hotlist. Once you have subscribed to a diary or diarist, the  icon will change to a  . Click this to remove the story from your hotlist. Comments that are replies to any of your comments are automatically added to your hotlist.



Search
This is an overview of the Street Prophets search engine. For more detailed instructions, see the Daily Kos search help.  There is a large amount of information and writing contained in Street Prophets.  One tool useful for finding specific pieces is the Search function, which is really just the Daily Kos search engine, restricted to Street Prophets material.  To use the search function, go to the page, type in the search term or terms, and hit the 'Search' button.  A Search can be restricted to look only within certain categories of text, including authors, tags, links, and images.  See the Daily Kos search help for a complete list and examples.

 

The type of search performed depends on the setting of the 'Find' pulldown menu.  By Daily Kos default, it is set to Stories: Street Prophets doesn't have any.  Setting it to Diaries will return results from user diaries;  Setting the 'Find' menu to Authors will return links to the user pages of the writer you are looking for.  The 'Diaries By' and 'Comments By' options use the previous version of the search engine which only supports author searches and only returns date-sorted results.  The results can be sorted by several criteria. Relevance, the default, is based on such things as where the search terms occur (near the beginning is best, in the title even better).  Comments, Recommendations, and Impact result in lists sorted numerically, with highest values at the top of the list.  Impact is a measure that combines the number of comments and the number of cookies into a single value.  The other pull-down menus allow you to restrict the date range for the search and change how many results appear per page.

Important note: If you use the 'Diaries By' or 'Comments By' settings in the Find menu, the sorting is strictly by date.

Tag Cloud

All diaries posted to Street Prophets are tagged. Tags are keywords that the diary author and/or readers add to identify the subject(s) of the diary. This allows people to easily find all of the diaries that deal with a specific subject. The complete (dailyKOS) list of tags is called the Tag Cloud. By default, it is sorted by number of diaries that use each tag, but this can be changed to alphabetical sorting in the Interfaces section of the 'My Profile' portion of the User Page. Trusted Users (TU) can edit the tags in any diary and that is a community job as important as troll rating. A list of the most used and approved (Daily Kos) tags can be found on the List of approved tags page. Tags should be added according to the Daily KosTag Guidelines below. See also: Daily Kos Tag Editors Workspace and DailyKos Tag Cleanup Project.

Advertising
On the right side of the page, there is a column of advertisements. Costs to maintain an Internet site such as Street Prophets are significant; the great majority of this cost is covered by the sale of advertisements.



Contributing to Street Prophets

Content contributions are the responsibility (and the privilege) of the whole Street Prophets community.  Registered users can post diaries, give cookies, and engage in online conversations.  Trusted users can do all that and give cookies or troll-rate comments, and see hidden comments.  They can also edit tags.  The site is maintained by the entire community, and all are welcome here (and appreciated!)

Financial contributions are different:  It requires funds to maintain a web site like Street Prophets.  While we do not officially solicit donations, any financial contributions you care to make will be greatly appreciated.  You can provide donations by clicking on "The Collection Plate" under the About header on the upper right of the front page.  You can also visit the "Street Prophets Store", which is right up there, too - and buy really cool stuff.  Either way, your contributions will be received with love.

Policies and Procedures
Registration and posting privileges
To do anything beyond simply reading diaries and comments, it is necessary to become a registered user, as described above. When you first register, there is a one day waiting period, after which you can write comments. After one week, you can write diaries, recommend other people's diaries, and rate comments. Posting and other activities are privileges granted by Pastor Dan, who owns this site. Sufficiently obnoxious behavior, at his discretion, can result in banning.



Trusted Users

If a user gathers enough cookies, they eventually become a Trusted User (TU). To prevent people from gaming the system, the exact cookie stash required is not publicly revealed.  Trusted Users have a few additional privileges compared to regular users.  A regular user can give cookies for comments; a TU can also give troll ratings.  If a comment gets enough troll ratings, it becomes hidden to regular users (also see the Dealing with trolls section below).  TUs can, if they wish, see the hidden comments.  TUs thus have the responsibility of deciding whether comments should be hidden or not.  In addition, TUs can edit and remove tags from diaries; regular users can only add new tags.  There are two easy ways to tell if you are a TU.  First is to look at the Tools sidebar; if there is an entry reading 'Hidden Comments', you are a TU.  The other way is to try to rate a comment; if there is a 'Troll' button next to the 'Cookies' button, you are a TU.  Of course, you can loose your TU status too.  If a user stops commenting, or their comments stop getting cookies, eventually that user will lose TU status.  This can be easily remedied by posting more comments that meet with the approval of the readership community.

Dealing with trolls

Trolling is a sad reality of Internet life today.  Most trolls tend to be blatant, posting comments or diaries that are clearly intended to provoke an angry response.  Other trollish messages are posted simply to disrupt the conversation in a diary.  Directly replying to the content of a trollish message is usually a waste of time; trolls tend not to be interested in actual discussion.

Luckily, this site is small enough that trolls haven't been a real problem here.  One suggested approach (in The Prayer Closet) is: surround any that come here with prayer.  There are two methods in wide use to help keep the community as troll-free as possible.  The first is troll-rating for troll comments.  Trusted Users (see below) can give comments a rating of troll.  If a comment has been rated by two or more users, and there are more troll ratings than recommends, then that comment (and all replies to it) are automatically hidden.  Hidden comments and their responses can only be seen by Trusted Users.

Troll Ratings
Only trusted users can give a rating of "troll".  Trusted users are limited to five troll-ratings per day, as an attempt to discourage their casual use.  This mechanism is buried deeply within our AJAX web server system.  Troll-rating marks a comment as a troll comment:  If you give one, then as a trusted user you are stating that the comment should be made invisible to all community members.  You're saying that the comment is so bad - so disruptive or damaging to the community - that it isn't even worth discussion, but should be dropped from the thread as malicious, inflammatory, off-topic, or just a plain lie.  This is the ONLY legitimate purpose of troll-ratings.  Comments that accumulate enough troll ratings simply vanish from view, although Trusted users can still view these hidden comments.  The troll-rating mechanism was NOT built for expressing disagreement!  Add your polite disagreement comment, if you want.  Use troll-ratings to express disagreement, and you run a chance of suppressing dissent - for the fact of being dissent. 

 

Daily Kos has an informative discussion about when a troll-rate is appropriate, and some of the common types of trolls  It can be found in the Daily Kos troll rating article, originally from this diary. Reading this article is highly recommended before issuing any troll-ratings.

Hidden vs. Deleted comments

Occasionally, a comment disappears from view and there is some dispute (usually from the comment author) as to the fate of that comment. The following text is provided as a reference to use in such disputes:

Comments are not deleted.  If you think your comment has been deleted, you are wrong.  If you really really think your comment has been deleted, you are wrong.  Yes, really.  Your comment has been hidden, but Trusted Users can still see it, and have the option to un-hide it.  Your comment is unlikely to be unhidden (trust us on this one).

Deleting Accounts

Accounts are forever, or at least as long as Street Prophets remains in existence.  Don't ask to have your account deleted.  Especially, don't publicly demand that your account be deleted, as this is virtually certain to lead to pity by the community. See (Daily Kos) GBCW.

Autoban

If enough of a user's comments are hidden, the site will automatically ban that user.  Banning means that a user can no longer post diaries or comments, or give out cookies.  The exact algorithm for determining how many comments are enough to trigger autoban is not publicly known. It is believed that the autoban has never been triggered at Street Prophets.

Our Blogfather Kos has stated that the determining factor is the number of comments that are troll-rated, not the number of troll-rates that each individual comment receives.  In other words, once a comment has entered the Hidden Comments section, additional troll-rates have no effect.  Since Trusted Users are limited in the number of troll-rates they can issue per day, it is recommended that they refrain from "piling on" additional troll-rates to an already-hidden comment.

Sock Puppets
(portions adapted from the Wikipedia entry on Sock Puppet)

Definition

A sock puppet is an additional account of an existing member pretending to be a separate user.  This may be used to mimic community support in an argument or for acting without consequence to one's 'main' account.  It is considered dishonest, trollish behavior, unless specifically approved by Pastor Dan in advance for (temporary) special purposes.  At Street Prophets the term 'sock puppet' can also be commonly applied to non-authorized accounts of previously banned users.

Identifying a Sock Puppet

Typically, the user has more knowledge than would be expected of a newcomer regarding the site's methods, rules, and community members; takes part in similar discussions and has mostly same opinions as the user's main account; and sometimes has an account name similar to those of other suspected sock puppets.

Penalties for Sock Puppetry

Though there is no officially articulated penalty for 'Sock Puppetry', there are many recorded instances of banning for the offense.

Banned users posting using an account not authorized by Pastor Dan are subject to repeated, continued banning.  It is the user, not the account, that is being penalized.

Webbugs, Scripts, and other mischief

From time to time some bright bulb decides to post an executable script or a webbug...such as an image linked to a browser stats package...in a diary or comment. Doing so will result in the immediate banning of that user.

UID numbers

Often, people refer to UID, or User ID, numbers. Every registered user has an ID number; these are assigned sequentially in order of registration. To find a UID, either yours or someone else's, find a comment written by that author. At the bottom of the comment, there are two links, one with the name of the author and the other with the date and time of the comment. The one with the author name contains the UID. For example, a comment by a Street Prophets user will have a link (to the author's profile) that looks like http://www.streetprophets.com/user/u... where nnn is the author's UID. Note that the UID appears in the address bar at the top of your browser, not on the web page itself.

Time Zones

To make sure that the comments show up with the proper time-of-writing, you need to set your time zone. To do this, go to your user page (link is on the right-hand sidebar), and click on the 'My Profile' tab. Click on the 'Display Preferences' link. On the pull-down menu labeled 'Your Time Zone', select the proper zone. Important Note: The software powering Street Prophets does not automatically adjust for Daylights Savings Time. You need to change the zone manually. For example, if you are located in the Central timezone of the US, during the fall and winter, select 'Central Standard Time' as your zone; during the spring and summer, change it to 'Central Daylight Time'.

Common terms and acronyms

An extensive list of terms and acronyms can be found in the Kossary; a few of the more common terms are listed here.

aoeu  The opposite of "n/t", this comment title means "I don't have a title, read the text". It represents an easily typed sequence on the Dvorak keyboard, the first four keys on the home row.

asdf  Like "aoeu", except it represents the first four keys on the home row of a standard English keyboard.

GBCW  GoodBye Cruel World. A type of diary where a user announces that they are through with dkos and are leaving for all time.  Posting a GBCW diary is usually not a good idea; they tend to be greeted with ridicule.  This diary (big download) is considered to be the Platonic ideal of GBCW diaries.

MetaJesus  This is a dailyKOS term, invoked when there is too much meta-discussion - that is to say discussion about dkos itself, usually with the phrase "stop making MetaJesus cry" or similar. MetaJesus was given life by Hunter in this diary, but other diaries invoking MetaJesus's name can be found here.

n/t  no text. Used by commenters when the entirety of the comment is the title.

SCLM  So-Called Liberal Media. Many people think that the idea of a "liberal media" is a myth.

snark  Sort of like "sarcasm".  It is generally used for a snappy saying that encompasses a healthy "irreverance" but doesn't quite fall into the realm of the sarcastic.

UID  User ID. Assigned sequentially in order of registration.  Lower UIDs mean a person has been registered at Street Prophets for a longer period of time.  (Not that that means a heck of a lot at Street Prophets.)

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Technical
Recommended browsers

In early 2006, the dailyKOS web server system (which we share, here at Street Prophets) was given a complete overhaul to use AJAX, a scripting language rapidly gaining popularity.  This new system requires a relatively recent web browser to work correctly. Recommended browsers for different operating systems are listed below; for more details, see these dailyKOS diaries.

• Windows
  • Firefox 2.0.0.6 (recommended)

  • Internet Explorer 5.5 or above (works, with some issues)
    
  • Opera 8.5 (some rendering issues)
    
  
  
• Macintosh
  • Safari (recommended for OS 10.3 and above; not supported for 10.2)

  • Firefox 2.0.0.6 (works; slower than Safari)
    
  • Camino 1.0 (recommended for OS 10.2)
    
  • Internet Explorer 5.2 (legacy mode only; works under 10.1)
    
  
  
• Linux
  • Firefox 2.0.0.6 (recommended)

  • Mozilla 1.7.12 (works well)
    
  • Konqueror 3.4 (has some rendering and posting problems)
    

Our web server system is continuously being revised, both to eliminate bugs and to add new features.