For newbies:
Welcome to the Mises forum! There’s a few things about the forum that are not completely intuitive, and I found that a lot of stuff has to keep getting explained multiple times, so I figured it would be helpful to just put everything in one thread that all newbs should visit. First thing’s first:
Change your profile settings
This is a pet peeve of mine…soon after I joined I discovered that the default setting on new accounts is that only “friends” can send private messages to you (aka “start a conversation”). This is kind of annoying, as, if any user wants to contact you they either have to send you a friend request, you accept it, then they can send you their message, or they have to post on your wall (which is even worse if they were looking to have any sort of dialogue with you). So:
When you’re signed in, if you look at the top right of the screen, next to your username you’ll see the “edit” link. Click that, then click the “site options” tab. (While you’re there look through all those settings and make sure they match what you’d like.) If you scoll down eventually you’ll see a section labeled “Conversations Configuration”. Click the radio button for the appropriate group. (Obviously, it’s most useful if you allow “all users” to contact you)
To quote other posts
So you may have noticed by now that the quote feature doesn’t work. You may have also seen the various ways people have come up with to quote others so that it is made known to whom and what they are replying. But most of those ways are cumbersome at the least, and usually confusing to the rest of the forum readers…so to quote properly:
You can go here and you’ll see an explanation of how to use the bookmarklet that helps with it…but if you don’t feel like messing with that even, you can just manually change ‘false’ to ‘true’ (in the url) every time you’re replying to someone. In other words, whenever you click “reply”, go to the address bar at the top of your browser screen and change that last word “false” to “true”…and then tap “enter” or “return”. (Personally I find that much easier and quicker). And then if you end up quoting from the same person a lot in the same post, you can just cut and paste and reuse the same brackets, and it will look like this. (If you end up quoting the same person a bunch of times, it sometimes helps to make it look neater if you only include their name in the first one, so it can be shown whom you’re replying to, and then in all the others you remove the “user=” part, and it will just be a box with their text. I’ll do that generally if I quote the same person more than 3 times in the same post. Like this. )
To link specific posts
If you look at the top left of each post, there’s an icon of a paper with a folded top-right corner (to the left of the poster’s username). That icon contains the specific URL for that particular post. If you right click that and select “copy link” you copy the link for that post. That is the URL you can use to hyperlink to specific posts.
Posts requiring moderation
If you submit a post with a large number of links (or some other possibly spammy characteristic) the system will flag it for moderation. You will be notified of this with a large message that says “POST PENDING MODERATION”. Do not freak out. Your post has not disappeared. All this means is that your post is placed in a limbo and will not appear in the thread until a human moderator approves it. This is a way to help prevent spam. If your post does not appear after 12-24 hours, send a message to a moderator and let them know you have a post that needs approval.
Blank posts
So there’s a yet undiagnosed issue with the forum that causes post content to get lost sometimes…resulting in a blank post. Like this. And this. If this happens to you, sorry, there is no way (we know of) to recover your brilliant prose. Here and here are quick threads with the basic recommendation: use a different browser. Firefox and Chrome/Chromium don’t seem to have any issues. (So join the new millenium and quit with the Internet Explorer, you laggard.)
But there are never any guarantees.
Rule of thumb: always always always higlight and copy your text before you click send.
Rule of thumb 2: if what you’re writing gets even past a paragraph, click the source button at the top left of the editor, highlight and copy it all onto Notepad. Repeat this every so often just in case the browser crashes. (Ask me how I learned to develop that habit.) The source button allows you to see the html code that makes up your post. If you copy that, all of your formatting is preserved…even if you paste into notepad. Then if you need to repaste it, just open up the text editor again, click the source button and paste it there.) Mistakes and mentors, folks. The only two ways to learn anything. The latter are a lot cheaper.
Favoriting posts
Basically not recommended. Use browser bookmarks instead (sure it’s a local solution, and means you can’t access them on any computer (well, technically you can), but it also means you get to group them and tag them for easier reference.)
Embed YouTube
There is a thread on this here. You can embed YouTube clips by simply using the following code:
[ View : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A ] (without the spaces…and make sure it’s plain text)
You can also add sizes for the display by adding that to the end of the URL, separated by colons…so using the same link,
[ View : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A : 640 : 385 ]
would yield the video in a 640x480 resolution. (640:385 is the recommended size)
Embed other flash video
Thread on this here. Not all sites are allowed/work with this forum, but others like Vimeo do. You can use the same process as above.
Beginnings in Austrian economics
Austrian economics links at Mises WIki - (all the relevant links to “what is Austrian economics?” “What should I read first?”, etc.)
Reading lists - collection of various recommended reading lists on various topics
