Category: Getting to Know You
Welcome to the zone
Hi. We want to welcome you to the zone and its many pleasures. We hope you will take a look around and, if you like what you see, we hope you will stay and contribute to the general insanity around here.
What the zone is.
As it says on the screen where you registered, "The Zone BBS offers you a place to meet new people, play games, and get away from the more stressful parts of life. The site includes games such as Anagram
Mania, Hangman, and Keno, message boards, Graffiti, and Quicknotes to talk to other users, private mail between members, user profiles, and much more.
This site is driven by its members, and we are always open to new ideas."
Basically, this means that the zone is a virtual community of people spending time together.
Most of the participants have some type of visual problem, but, not everyone. No statistics are kept about how many visually impaired people are here, or how many teachers, or trainers of the blind are on here.
Participants play games, exchange ideas, or talk to one another through quick notes, private messages, and voice chat (with the use of a microphone).
What the Zone is not.
The zone is not a place to harass other users. By harass, we mean,
repeatedly annoy other users after they have requested such annoyance to sease
Threats against other users
The spreading of personal information
Sending multiple or excessively large quicknotes which are designed to annoy or crash others' computers
Sending spam or chain letters in public or private communications.
In general, the zone is not your mother or father, your pastor, or your lover.
Once again quoting from the main log on screen "Please note that we do not censor our members thoughts, and believe in freedom of speech. There are options to ignore most forms of communication if you
choose not to participate, and we encourage you to make your own decisions as to what you view as acceptable content. We are not your parents."
In other words, it's just people getting to know one another and having fun.
To find out what's not allowed, refer to the "terms of service" from the loggon screen at
terms of service
Very very good description. Thank you. Yes, I agree about "what the zone is not".
What is this for exactly? it seems like waste of time.
Yes, I should have explained, sorry.
This is my attempt to provide a draft help file for new users. It is the result of a topic in zone bbs suggestions called something like zone helpfiles.
That discussion can be found
here.
I hope folks will fill in helpfiles that they want new users to read concerning how the zone works.
Just an experiment.
Thanks.
Bob
Okay, I'm still having problems with links etc. The discussion is in the zone bbs suggestions and is called zone bbs help files?.
Thanks.
Bob
Hi Bob.
Another user in the past created something simmilar. It's in the suggestions but i don't know the exact page so i will give the address.
http://www.zonebbs.com/boards.php?view&topic_id=7908
Since then we got some new things for example the terms of use that didn't exist at the time.
Yes, this was attempted before, and I thought the admins and CL's were discussing the possibility of actually finalizing the suggestions into one file and then sending them to new members who are confirmed as members. But it has never happened.
Two things I would put in the help files are:
1. Directions for toggling off qun's or turning them off altogether. When I first joined, I was confused by the public qn's and found them very distracting. I didn't even know you could turn them off for several days until I asked someone.
2. Suggest that people check out the announcements boards right away because that is a good way of learning about features that have been added over time.
Bob, this is a good start, and I would agre that sending this out to new members is a great idea. There are varying degrees of people's comfort/ability to surf the net, and by not having this on a log-in screen tat people may or may not be able to navigate is really nice. All this to say that the thought of sending this out with notice of account confirmation is a great idea.
Secondly, and I'm not sure how I feel about this, in adition to what Becky said, would we want to go into how the screen is laid out with headings, and suggested ways to navigate using various screenreaders? Again, I'm not sure how I feel about this, but if we want to put this into the soup, we can always throw it back out.
Thanks for the effort.
Lou
wow, you put a lot of thought into this and it's great! :) maybe this should be used. Lol
I don't mind working on help files, but since I found out that Brice24 put out a similar article some time ago (one that, in my opinion, is superior to mine) which has been languishing in the bowels of the boards for some time, I figure it's up to the administration to do something with it.
I don't mind working on something like this, and I think it would be helpful. However, it would take the support of the administration for this thing to work. New users would have to know that such a thing exists. Hell, old users would have to know it too. <lol>
Frankly, I'm a little hacked off, because I put some effort into my endeavor and find out that someone else has also done work on a similar project.
For anyone who wishes to read Brice24's post, it's in the Zonebbs suggestions board called "Here you go; final copy".
Bob
o.k. Bob... Good Going!