If you're reading this, you probably just recently made your account here on the Grasscity forums, and as such you might have some basic questions about what you are allowed to post about and what certain things mean. Hopefully after reading this thread, those questions will be answered!
First things first...
FORUM RULES (official thread)
When you created your account, you agreed to abide by the forum rules. The thread with all of the rules is stickied (permanently fixed) at the top of every sub-forum, and you can also find it here. Here are some of the big ones:
- You must be at least 18 years of age to be a member of the GC forums. If you are younger than 18, you should not be here. Period.
- There are four drugs you are allowed to discuss here: marijuana, tobacco, alcohol and caffeine. Discussion of any other drugs, including (but not limited to) shrooms, acid, ecstasy, MDMA, cocaine, crack, heroin, amphetamines, DXM, DMT, and even legal smoking blends is expressly forbidden.
- You are not allowed to make threads asking for a connection or a hook-up of any sort.
- Name calling, arguing, and creating drama are not tolerated. If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. All it takes is a few users who disagree to get a great thread permanently closed. Don't be that guy.
WHERE SHOULD I POST?
No matter what topic you want to make a thread on, GC probably has a forum for it. We have a place for...
...any and every question about weed you (n)ever thought to ask (Apprentice Tokers).
...discussion of pipes, bubblers, bongs, steamrollers, joints, blunts, one-hitters, vaporizers, and any other smoking device you can name (Toking Tools).
...discussion of different strains, or showing off your latest pick up (Stash Jar).
...music, musicians, bands and artists (Music Hall).
...all your creative endeavors, and the appreciation of art of all varieties (The Artist's Corner).
...movies, TV shows, videos you find online, sports, and video games.
...funny shit (Forum Humor).
...everything there is to know about growing your own herb (Marijuana Cultivation).
...questions about GC and your thoughts on the forums (General Feedback).
And that's not even an exhaustive list! So before you post in General, save a mod the trouble and make sure there isn't a more appropriate forum to post in.
SEARCHING...DO IT (official thread)
The GC forums have a very powerful search tool built in. It takes less than a minute to type in a few words, hit Search, and scroll through the first page of results. If doing that doesn't come up with anything useful, try clicking "Advanced Search" and selecting "Search Titles Only." This will only show threads whose titles match your search terms, instead of all threads that happen to contain them. Besides this, the Advanced Search page offers several other features: you can restrict your search to a specific sub-forum, user, or date range - and there's even an option at the bottom to save your search preferences for the future!
To perform a quick search without leaving a thread, you can highlight some text and click the little magnifying glass that appears. Or, if you prefer, you can do a Google search for the phrase of your choice along with the word "Grasscity"; more often than not, you'll find what you're looking for.
No matter how you choose to search, please do search before you just make a new thread. The general policy around here is, if there's already a thread on a topic, post in it rather than making a new thread.
REPUTATION (official thread)
"Reputation," or "rep," refers to the colored bar(s) that appear above everyone's username. When you first start out, you only have one bar. If people approve of your posts and add to your reputation, you will start to get more reputation points, and more rep bars along with them. Once you have 11 rep bars (5 dark green and 6 light green) and approximately 1500 reputation points, you have achieved "full rep," meaning that you will continue to collect reputation points but you won't get any more bars.
You can check your current number of reputation points by going to your User Control Panel (CP) and scrolling down to where it says "Latest Reputation Received." There you can see who contributed to your rep, when, what thread it was in, and (if they left one) a little comment about your post from the person who repped you. These reputation postings come in three varieties:
- Positive (
) rep means that someone agreed with your post. Positive reps increase your number of rep points.- Neutral (
) rep means that the person who repped you is either too new to the forums or doesn't have enough rep to affect your reputation. Someone who has fewer rep bars/points than you do cannot affect your rep.- Negative (
) rep means that someone disagreed with you, or that you broke a rule. As of right now, only paid members and moderators have the ability to issue neg rep. (See here for details.)To contribute to another user's reputation, just click the little scale icon (
) right next to the post number in any thread. Pro tip: Clicking this icon on one of your own posts will tell you how much, if any, rep you have received from that post, and how many rep points you currently have.It is generally considered polite and good etiquette to visit the profile of a user who has contributed to your reputation and leave him or her a thank you, although this is up to you completely.
USER CP IS YOUR FRIEND
Your User Control Panel, or User CP, is the place to go to modify just about anything to do with your account, and to keep track of your subscribed threads and reputation.
Along the lefthand side are the links to edit your details (contact info, user title, location, favorite strains, etc.), customize the appearance of your profile, manage privacy settings, and change or remove your profile picture (the picture that people see when they actually go to your profile).
Underneath that, in Settings & Options, you can edit your avatar (the picture that appears under your name and user title in all your posts), signature (the text, quote, or picture that gets appended to all your posts), options, and ignore list. Under that is where you view and compose private messages (which only you and one other user can see) and manage your subscribed threads. The righthand side of the User CP page also shows subscribed threads that have unread posts in them.
But you may be wondering...what are subscribed threads? The idea is, if you want to keep track of a certain thread, whether because you made the thread and want to know when people reply in it or just because it's a funny thread, you subscribe to it. You may have noticed the drop-down menu called "Thread Subscription Notification Type" under "Additional Options" every time you make a post. You can subscribe either using this drop-down menu or by clicking on "Thread Tools" toward the top of the page and choosing "Subscribe to this Thread." You can subscribe to get email notifications when someone posts in a thread, or just to get notification in your User CP. The default setting when you create a new account is "Instant Email Notification," but you can change this default under Options in the User CP.
FORMATTING YOUR POSTS
There's a lot you can do with your posts, and it's not very obvious how to do much of it. First of all, you can use BB code - tags such as [noparse], [I], , [CENTER], and [SIZE][/noparse] - to make your text bold or centered, for example. You can also use the buttons at the top of the text field for new posts to insert these tags for you. The general format for these tags is [noparse][TAG]text here[/TAG], or [TAG="value"]text here[/TAG][/noparse]. Tags like [noparse] and [HIGHLIGHT][/noparse] follow the first format, while tags like [noparse] and [FONT][/noparse] follow the second format.
To insert a link to another webpage, use the [noparse][/noparse] tag, or, alternatively, click the button with a picture of the earth and two links in a chain. Enter the address of the page you want to link to, and type whatever text you want to appear instead of the web address between the two [noparse][URL][/noparse] tags. So, for example, to create a link to the Google homepage that says "search," you would type [noparse][URL="http://www.google.com/"]search[/noparse], which produces this: [URL="http://www.google.com/"]search. You can also use this procedure to post a YouTube video in a thread, as long the "Automatically parse links in text" and "Automatically embed media" checkboxes are selected for that post (which they always are by default).
To post a picture, use the [noparse][/noparse] tag, or, alternatively, click the button that looks like a picture of a mountain against a yellow background. The [noparse][IMG][/noparse] tag only works for image files that are on the Internet somewhere, not files on your hard drive. To post an image that you have on your computer, you must first upload it (using a service such as [URL="http://imageshack.us/"]ImageShack[/URL] or [URL="http://tinypic.com/"]TinyPic[/URL]), then use the [noparse][IMG][/noparse] tag with the web address of the uploaded picture. For a picture that's already on the web, make sure the address you use in the [noparse][IMG][/noparse] tag is a link to a picture file (i.e., ends in .jpg, .gif, or .bmp, [B]NOT[/B] .html, .htm, or .php), or else the image won't show up. As an example, typing [noparse][IMG]http://www.time4hemp.com/images/420_pot_leaf_6a7a.gif[/IMG[/noparse] produces this lovely image:
[IMG]http://www.time4hemp.com/images/420_pot_leaf_6a7a.gif[/IMG]
[B][U]WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?[/U][/B]
If you have any problems that need to be dealt with, you should contact either of the forum administrators, [URL="http://forum.grasscity.com/members/113-reformmaryjanelaws.html"]ReformMaryJaneLaws[/URL] (sometimes referred to as RMJL or "Rummy") or [URL="http://forum.grasscity.com/members/2-superjoint.html"]superjoint[/URL] (a/k/a SJ). You can also find a list of forum moderators [URL="http://forum.grasscity.com/general-feedback/162927-grasscity-community-listing-administrators-super-moderators-moderators.html"]here[/URL]. You can easily tell if someone is a mod by looking at the [URL="http://forum.grasscity.com/general-feedback/672494-username-colors-what-do-they-all-mean.html"]color of their username[/URL]: moderators and super-moderators have green names, while forum guides (a/k/a "junior mods") have purple names.
If you see a post that violates the forum rules or that you believe needs to be acted upon by a moderator, click the report button ([IMG]http://cloudimages.g...tons/report.gif) - located right next to the rep button - and type a brief explanation of why you reported the post. [B]This is the most effective way to handle problem posts and problem users, not calling them out and making a scene.
[B][U]BLADES? HUH?
You may notice GC members referring to each other as "blades" or "bladies." This is a pun on the fact that we are a "Grass city," made up of individual "blades." And if you can't figure out what "bladies" refers to...come talk to me.
All right...that's all I can think of at the moment. If anyone has any ideas about how to improve this thread, please let me know!
Edited by passage2bangkok, 22 October 2010 - 03:29 PM.
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