The ATS Issues Thread

Interrupting your conversation a bit to share some of my thoughts on it.

I understand that as long as someone is cooperative, willing and civil when there is asked for such behavior. You do not get a permanent ban.

Could it be that the one banned was not, do to what ever reason, willing to do so ?

I unfortunately missed the original ( conflict ? ) Well... maybe not.But it seems this discussion will not go anywhere near an answer anytime soon.

Just my two cents.

Anyway...

Have a nice day.

well well i am new on here and have been finding my feet.

i am not blind to what goes on all over the world with in goverments and organizations.

and all organizations have their few neo nazi my way or the highway attitudes.

and many people saying they have intelligance.

but i have noticed when your new to any site it takes time to fit into the scene...

now in my first post i got a really snarky reply from a member who had been on here longer than me.

planets

i had found the technology involved interesting...and the post has gone nowhere and that does not bother me.

i have so much other secret info such as fbi files and cia documents and much other .

i also have over 4000hrs of interesting video...and having a place to intelligently share is a good offer.

now trying to force my point of view is not what i would want to do...but to offer intelligent alternatives to what the status quo is i think is a valuble thing.

intelligent people i think take in information,process it,then make a fair judgment call on it's validity.

now if someone is being obstenant and abusive...that is a time to ingore it as they will have a very narrow closed minded veiw.

if your willing to just sit and battle to sway one persons opinion then that is your own personal loss.

but if you put the information out there knowing that people have the intelligence to come to some sort of reasonable conclusion then you have done your job well and be proud

there are alot of issues out there to be dicussed and thank you ATS for providing a forum.

but i will also say...ATS has to survive to and they take in funds from advertising which on it's own accord holds sway over judgement calls...

soon as money is involved you have people to answer too...and ATS will be no different. (my opinion)

now i might get some backlash for that statement but ATS knows that too, just as most people on here do.

That is not a bad thing cause one must always work within a system to expose the system so keep up the good work ATS and i thank you for a place to speak out.

for people to bitch and moan and just go into posts to attack the people whom post that is the norm...but the more intelligent person will recognize that and not engage in the battle...and to simply reply saying you will only try to stay on subject of the OP is a reasonable response at anytime

i am sure that banning on here is taken with some seriousness...and when a post becomes a personal attack upon an individual they should be alerted...warned...then banned if the abusive personal attacks become the members norm.

i always look forward to open intelligent debate...but soon as i become personally attack for my OPINION then i just abort the conversation and move on, as why would i choose to waste my energy on such cases when there are imporatant issues of far more peril that need to be discussed.

the world in in a bad way...and many people will suffer soon and it is these types of debates and open forums that could help solve some of these Global issues that are invading our lives on this planet.

so live in peace and learn to get along stop behaving like children GROW UP





[edit on 25-7-2010 by plube]

[edit on 25-7-2010 by plube]

Originally posted by plube
now in my first post i got a really snarky reply from a member who had been on here longer than me.

planets

i had found the technology involved interesting...and the post has gone nowhere and that does not bother me.

Hi and welcome to ATS.

Sorry about the snarky reply you got, If you get a personal attack you can complain, but if someone is snarky about your subject matter, there's really not much you can do about it, since that's not a terms and conditions violation. Personally I find the technology interesting too, and may I suggest if you had actually talked about the technology in the OP, I probably would have given a positive reply.

However instead of talking about the technology, you presented a MSM (aka mainstream media, though some argue that channel isn't) view and I've personally found that ATS can be very much anti-MSM, and perhaps in that case with good cause, since the story presented by the MSM seems fairly disingenuous to me. They falsely imply they can determine if the alien planets have life when Mars and Europa are trillions of times closer, and may have liquid water, and we can't even tell if those bodies have life or not. So I think they are yanking our chain about possibly finding alien life in the next few years, the best they can do outside our solar system is find conditions for it. SETI is another story but that wasn't the topic of your thread.

We all get some snarky replies from time to time and as long as the snarkiness is about the subject and not about us personally, we just have to take it in stride and move on to the next post or the next thread. At least he only bashed your subject matter and not you. Thanks to the good moderation by the mods, this forum is a whole lot less snarky than many other forums on the internet, so be thankful for that!

Hi,

Not complaining here, but I noticed earlier that the bbcode to resize text doesn't work quite right all the time.

A couple of times now I tried to set the size of the text to 1 and it just showed up regular size with the [ size = 1] [ /size ] (spaces added so it would show up in the post) part at the beginning and end, respectively. Don't know if it's a bug or what but I just thought I'd mention it. Thanks for your time.


TheAssoc.

[edit on 26-7-2010 by TheAssociate]

Well here's something new

And entire FULL PAGE AD

That appears

"while the site (ATS) is loading".


Is this just the beginning of the commercialization of ATS ????

My suggestion is that ATS offer a premium version with a small monthly/yearly fee that would allow premium users to not deal with ads and maybe ad some customization to a homepage.

reply to post by TheAssociate


When using that particular feature, you can not use or have anything in between the brackets other than "letters"...

Any special characters and even some punctuation will throw it off...

I have the most luck when I remember to always punctuate outside of any special character brackets..

Hope this helps...

Semper

[edit on 7/26/2010 by semperfortis]

ATS Team:

May I ask a potentially dumb question?

No.......it's not "why can't I stay out of chemtrail threads....."

It's about this "cross posting" business.

I mostly post in the "UFOs & Aliens Forum" & the "Medical Forum".

Sometime in those, I am refering to complex information (text & visual) that has previously been posted by myself or another member in a different thread.

For purposes of clarity & convenience, sometimes I will copy the info from the "other" post into my "current" post, explain I have done that & also provide a link to that post. I will also always credit the member who provided the original info, if it wasn't my info.

Someone suggested to me that is "cross posting" & therefore against the T&C's. Is that correct?

Kind regards
Maybe...maybe not

reply to post by TheAssociate


The most common reason is the use of an apostrophe.

This doesn't work

This does work

reply to post by Maybe...maybe not


Two different things there.

1d.) Cross-Posting: You will not cross-post content from other discussion boards (unless you receive advance permission from The Above Network, LLC). You will not post-by-proxy the material of banned members or other individuals who are not members, but have written a response to content within a thread on these forums.

What you're referring to would be more related to

1h.) Spamming: You will not post identical content, or snippets of identical content, to multiple threads in the discussion forums. You will also not create more than one thread for your topic, or create multiple "slightly different" threads for a single topic.

We're fairly liberal about it, and it goes to intent. What you're referring to would be acceptable and in fact, would potentially bring additional clarity to a topic. Reasonable people can agree what "spamming" really is, and there's generally not a whole lot of ambiguity about it when it's occurring.

If there's relevant info in another thread, there's absolutely nothing wrong with bringing that into a discussion with a brief explanation and appropriate link.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Cheers for that...i will add that to things i need to keep in mind here...

but hey we all have to learn...but by the same token..

It doe show when someone has become a memebr so a little tolerance does help to encourage people to do a better job....

and usually things do come from MSM and it does need to be disected...knowing that by bringing it here it is open to a complete and thorough disection i would think.

but no worries i was not upset...i have been online since the early days of the internet...when actually you actually could only comunicate through a BBS (bulletin board service) for those youngsters out there....lol

and i will make a better atempted at tearing down the technology so that i may have it pointed out how badly i have done at it.

i am learning fast and i am colating my thousands of documents and 4000hrs of video.

i do appreciate your advice

Originally posted by TheAssociate
Hi,

Not complaining here, but I noticed earlier that the bbcode to resize text doesn't work quite right all the time.

A couple of times now I tried to set the size of the text to 1 and it just showed up regular size with the [ size = 1] [ /size ] (spaces added so it would show up in the post) part at the beginning and end, respectively.

semperfortis and ArMap have already responded, but I thought I'd add that there is usually a workaround, which is to use HTML escape characters to replace whatever characters are messing up your bbcode.

So for example:

This won't work because of the apostrophe:
americandingbat's example[/size=1]

But this will work because I've given the escape character code instead:
americandingbat's example

The code for the apostrophe is &#39. Just type that instead of the apostrophe. There are lots of sources around the internet with lists of character codes, I just used this one.

edit because preview messed things up

[edit on 7/26/2010 by americandingbat]

Personally i find if you too blunt with your beliefs its never recieved well. Thats why i have a habit of posting my opion (on topic of course) and don't bother to go look at replies 90% of the time. I know as soon as i submit something, someone is going to be rubbed the wrong way. So i let them be rubbed all wrong, so their peice and let the masses decide for themselves who is right or wrong.

Whenever you get long arguments on the forums, no one looks good in it even if someone is right. Doesn't matter who it is and their reputation. A casual observer will laugh at it as childish.

Thats why i believe if you wish to debate/argue, make a post discussing your side, let people reply and leave it at that. Unless you need to clarify your position, i see no point in continuing the discussion. Unless some new evidence comes to light changing your mind, their is no reason to continue the discussion.

People need to learn that just because someone disagrees with you, doesnt give you the right to go on wild tangents crusading against them, and them against you creating a vicious circle of madness.

Just stop and think about who you wanna portray yourself as and act accordingly, if that means you want to look like an ass then by all means release the verbal diahrea. If you want to see true progress and an elevation of a communities collective concious, then try to act better then other people do on forums and be an example of the attitude you want to have here without shoving it down peoples throats.

Just my Opinion, if it offends you, i am not sorry :p

sorry double post...

second line, different then the first.

[edit on 26-7-2010 by EspyderMan]

reply to post by yeahright


Yeahright.....

Thanks for clarifying that point for me.

Your explanation aligns with how I thought things worked in that regard until someone "put the wind up me".

Kind regards
Maybe...maybe not

Originally posted by americandingbat
semperfortis and ArMap have already responded, but I thought I'd add that there is usually a workaround, which is to use HTML escape characters to replace whatever characters are messing up your bbcode.

So for example:

This won't work because of the apostrophe:
americandingbat's example[/size=1]

But this will work because I've given the escape character code instead:
americandingbat's example

The code for the apostrophe is &#39. Just type that instead of the apostrophe. There are lots of sources around the internet with lists of character codes, I just used this one.

edit because preview messed things up

[edit on 7/26/2010 by americandingbat]

Converting the string using htmlentities is much faster and easier and you dont need to write a list. Plus its a good security feature for strings for user submitted material anyhow. You would need to convert it to htmlentities prior to it being inserted to the datasource, so that the record comes out as entities instead of actual text. You can then use a function in php which will decode these entities, but most times with proper document declaration that is unnecessary.

Also, it can be used to override the servers language setting, some servers serve text in ISO Format, with this function you can declare text as UTF-8 instead, allowing for french characters to show up properly, and some other not widely used symbols.

Just a suggestion.

Ive written a lot of PHP code in my time (13 years worth) so if you ever need some friendly advice, hit me up.

[edit on 26-7-2010 by EspyderMan]

I have a question about changes to the ATS bbcode regarding quote and external source tags.

I noticed the quotes now appear in scroll boxes.

Is ATS in the middle of a change doing something similar with external source tags?

They seem to be broken in a thread I just read, where the external source tags show a limited amount of text just like the quote tags but there's no scroll bar appearing yet so you can't see the rest of the text. Or is there a new word limit on external sources?

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I noticed that about the external source tags today too.

This is pure speculation but I wonder if it might have to do with the issue discussed in this thread.

I don't like the new scroll boxes for material in quote tags, but I can see how having non-scrolling boxes for ex tags might be useful in enforcing site T&C about using only brief excerpts of external material and giving links.

reply to post by americandingbat
Thanks for the info.

Well I did follow the ATS site guidelines that say to use 3 paragraphs or less, or no more than 15% whichever is less, in fact I only used 2 paragraphs out of a very long article so it's way less than 10%. But the second paragraph doesn't show up at all, only the first paragraph.

Not only that, but my external source was wikipedia, which is unlikely to file any lawsuits against ATS for citing some if its content.

ATS can set up whatever rules it deems fit and I'll try to follow them, but I need to know what they are and if there's been some change it would be nice to know what it is.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Or is there a new word limit on external sources?

We've always stressed that only a small snippet of external sources should be used, along with a link to the source. I happened to have been working on some related new code for the 2010 site, and discovered a graceful way to visually limit the displayed text of external sources. Hopefully, this will help everyone focus a little more on the most-relevant portion of off-site content, and use that.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Not only that, but my external source was wikipedia, which is unlikely to file any lawsuits against ATS for citing some if its content.

Our long-standing guidelines/rules regarding off-site content were never initiate over lawsuit concerns. The rules are in-place because it simply reflects good Internet manners.