Tips For Newbies. Add a helpful tip for using and cruising ATS ~ Be the Teach! :)

ANYTHING UNDER THE SUN

It's like being lost in the Jungle for some people starting out here.

I'm a Newbies and I am slowly figuring out things. I've read that ATS has in recent times undergone major renovations so even seasoned veterans may be learning the Ropes again.

Please add some helpful advice here for Newbies. Stuff that you you have learned over weeks,months and years of being here. Let us learn from your mistakes and achievement.

~ Something you learned the hard-way.
~ What not to do
~ Posting new Topics Tip
~ Helpful links
~ etc.................................

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. ~Mark Van Doren

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. ~John Cotton Dana

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition. ~Jacques Barzun

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. ~Henry Brooks Adams

A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others. ~Author Unknown

A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism. ~Louis A. Berman

Teaching is leaving a vestige of one self in the development of another. And surely the student is a bank where you can deposit your most precious treasures. ~Eugene P. Bertin

The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book. ~Author Unknown

www.quotegarden.com...

reply to post by amy2x


Nice idea for a thread, here are two things that jump to mind:

What not to do

Troll, be generally disrespectful or not at least be willing to listen to another persons point of view. You don't nescessarily have to agree with someone but it is possible to argue in a grown up manner, although I'm no saint myself

Posting new Topics Tip

I'm a little picky on this one and in all honesty it's the quality of posts/threads that count however personally I automatically disregard posts & threads with bad spelling and punctuation. It doesn't have to be the queens, perfect english but simple things like using capital letters correctly in thread titles makes all the difference for me.

Get out!

Get out now, before its too late!

reply to post by amy2x

How long do I have to edit one of my posts?

If you leave it too long, you will get a message saying that you have exceeded the "4 Hour" window for editing.
But this message is not telling the truth.
If you open the edit window shortly after posting, there is a little window above the edit box telling you that you have "x" minutes left to edit. But the countdown appears to start at 120 minutes. In the rest of the world, this is only two hours.
So don't think you can leave a post for three hours and then try to correct your spelling, because you can't.

Familiarize yourself with ATS Terms and Conditions of Use.

We expect civility and decorum within all topics - Please Review This Link.

ATS Freshman's Forum

Welcome to ATS, it's time to introduce yourself.

Starting a new thread? Read this first.

Posting video links? Please read this!

This question keeps coming up;

How can I know who responded to one of my posts?

Go to "Messages", either via the ribbon at the bottom of the page, or via the Tools+ link at the top.
Within "Messages", there is a link for "Replies".
That gives a list of every reply to your posts. Click on one, the link will appear in the message screen, and you can go straight to it.

Originally posted by Death_Kron
reply to post by amy2x

 

Nice idea for a thread, here are two things that jump to mind:

What not to do

Troll, be generally disrespectful or not at least be willing to listen to another persons point of view. You don't nescessarily have to agree with someone but it is possible to argue in a grown up manner, although I'm no saint myself

Posting new Topics Tip

I'm a little picky on this one and in all honesty it's the quality of posts/threads that count however personally I automatically disregard posts & threads with bad spelling and punctuation. It doesn't have to be the queens, perfect english but simple things like using capital letters correctly in thread titles makes all the difference for me.

Thanks. The disrespectful rule is good. I constantly see the most fowl comments on you video comment and Channel comment. Some is so perverse that I wonder if children would be safe around those individuals. I read that things were out of control here for a while. Makes people not want to come back to a forum if there is not some civility.

All Caps on a thread Title or in a post are a turn off. Firefox has a great spell checker.

Originally posted by DISRAELI
reply to post by amy2x

 

How long do I have to edit one of my posts?

If you leave it too long, you will get a message saying that you have exceeded the "4 Hour" window for editing.
But this message is not telling the truth.
If you open the edit window shortly after posting, there is a little window above the edit box telling you that you have "x" minutes left to edit. But the countdown appears to start at 120 minutes. In the rest of the world, this is only two hours.
So don't think you can leave a post for three hours and then try to correct your spelling, because you can't.

That's a good one to know.

I never noticed the Ribbon at the bottom until you mentioned it. Very useful!

This question keeps coming up too;

My profile lists the people I have "friended"; but where's the list of people who have done the same to me?

Within your profile, click on the "Friends" link at the top.
The list of names down the left-hand side will now be people who have "friended" you, instead of the other way round.

My favorite new "toy," at the bottom ribbon where there is a link for "messages," there is a tab under messages for "replies" and you can see if anyone has replied to any of your posts! It is a great quick link if you only have a few minutes to respond to a conversation.

reply to post by greeneyedleo


Excellent Links

Within your profile, click on the "Friends" link at the top.
The list of names down the left-hand side will now be people who have "friended" you, instead of the other way round.

Excellent "Friend" tip from DISRAELI

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/4b69f8fc3121.jpeg[/atsimg]

Originally posted by getreadyalready
My favorite new "toy," at the bottom ribbon where there is a link for "messages," there is a tab under messages for "replies" and you can see if anyone has replied to any of your posts! It is a great quick link if you only have a few minutes to respond to a conversation.

I'm not seeing the tab under Messages. Messages button touches very bottom of my screen.Nothing under it.

Originally posted by amy2x
Messages button touches very bottom of my screen.Nothing under it.

I think he means "underneath" in the sense that if you click on it, it will bring up the relevant new screen.

reply to post by DISRAELI


Right. Click on messages, then you come to the messages screen where you can send U2Us and such, on the left side of the screen there are some tabs, if you click the "replies" tab, it will show you a list of all the people that have replied to your posts and bring up links to those replies.

reply to post by amy2x
Learning the hard way:

Don’t be afraid to challenge anyone. The ‘big names’ were newbies once and every single one of them has made an ass of themselves at least once. In a way, you’re nobody on ATS until you’ve made a post or thread that makes you cringe at the memory. My current score there is at least 2 crap threads and about 500 posts.

Cool avatars don’t equal cool posts. No avatar doesn’t mean they have nothing to say. In a lot of threads, a lonely voice with no avatar gets no stars or replies after writing the best post. People just scroll past. See below…

Star posts and flag threads. It costs nothing and might make the difference between a new member staying or leaving. Nobody likes to feel ignored or left out.

Don’t take things personally:

ATS has members who only exist to remind other members to ‘use the search function’ or that ‘this has been posted before.’ Screw those guys. Hall monitors and tell-tales don’t change into butterflies after leaving school…they stay the same.

See above. The member ripping on your post might be 13. They might be a maladjusted adult with the social skills of a dog humping your armchair. There's also a good chance that they're right...

I don’t know if it’s some freaky Zen warfare, but you can win a battle by not posting. Letting someone have the last word is often the best way to gain the upper hand.

Sometimes it’s hard not to take it personally and sometimes they make it personal. You can either post in anger or wait a while and do it properly. This is the little known ‘Art of the Ambush.’ I’ve been ambushed a few times and it’s way more fun being the ambusher.

Don’t be afraid to be wrong and be yourself as much as possible.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Those tips are excellent.

The things you describe go on in most forums.

It's like the show Cheers. Every forum has their Cliff Clavens. LoL