New Member Walk-Through

This site is set up to give members as many options as possible to display their creativity and to facilitate interaction with other roleplayers.  It isn't as straight forward as forum based sites and some of the options might be confusing so this guide is recommended if you've created your account and are wondering what to do next.

Things to do

1. Create an account
2. Edit your profile
3. Add your guild
4. Add your character
5. Add your alliance
6. See a list of all of your characters
7. Write a journal entry
8. Post on the forums
9. Add your own guide
10. Add someone to your friends list
11. Leave a note on your friend's guestbook
12. Write a blog entry

Create an account

You will have to create an account to add any content to the site.  I recommend using your character name so if and when you post content it doesn't say "by IRLulzCat" which makes a lot of RPers shudder and immediately ignore anything you post.  If you create your account and at some point change mains or for whatever reason want to change it, just send me a PM.

You MUST use a valid e-mail address because a validation link will be e-mailed that you will need to click before you'll be able to login.  Your e-mail address is not shown publicly.  If your e-mail has an aggressive anti-spam filter, it might mark this e-mail as spam and send it to a spam folder rather than your primary in-box.  If you do not receive an e-mail within 5-10 minutes of registering, check your spam folders, and if you are sure you didn't receive the e-mail then please send me an e-mail so I can manually give you access.  If it comes to that, there may be up to a 24 hour delay if you happen to catch me on a day when IRL is kicking my butt.

Edit Profile

Once you are logged in, on the left side menu you should see a My Account link. Clicking this will take you to your profile and it should look something like this:

You should see your login name, a set of tabs, and whatever information you’ve put into your profile so far. By default you are in tab #1, the View tab, which shows you what other people viewing your account page will see (minus most of the tabs).  Each tab has different options for your account, although when you first start don't be surprised if most of them are empty.

Click the edit tab and make any changes you want to do at this time.  Some of the options are adding a signature, adding a small avatar, and changing the text entry options.  In particular, if you DO NOT want to receive email notification when posts are made to your realm group, uncheck the box in the Messaging and Notifications section.

Add your guild

Once you have finished messing around with your profile, you'll want to post information about your character.  But before you start, if your character belongs to a guild, head over to the Guild Listing to see if your guild has been added to the list yet.  If it has, you can go on to the next step of adding your character. 

If it hasn't been added yet, add it to the list.  Do this even if you aren't the guild leader or officer because all you really need to add at this time is the name of the guild and whether it is an Order or Destruction guild.  Guild listings are revisioned so anyone who is a member of the site can edit any guild listing.  Before you panic and think this is a horrible idea, know that the information is protected in the same manner wiki's work.  If some yahoo decides to erase information and/or post derogatory information an administrator can quickly and easily revert back to the previous version. 

The only required fields are the name and the realm.  Fill in the other fields if you feel comfortable, or leave them blank so an officer can fill it in at a later time.  The main thing here is to make sure you spell it exactly as it is found in game.  Hit save, and then head on over to the add character page!

Add your character

You can add your character (RP bio) by either following the link under the Create Content menu (left sidebar) or going to the Character Listing page and clicking the link at the bottom of that page.  Character pages can only be edited by the person who added them and administrators, so only characters that you play.

Now comes the fun part!  Add as much or as little information as you want about your character.  Bio's help you define who your character is and how they react to other characters while role-playing.

You will not be able to add the guild name if you didn't add it earlier.  If you are guildless, just leave it blank.  If you are running into problem with it not accepting the guild name, double check to see if it is in the listing (add it if it isn't), or leave the guild name blank and send me a PM with information about what errors you are getting if not.

Add your alliance

If your guild belongs to an alliance, feel free to add it.  Alliances are freely editable like guild pages.  You will only be able to list guilds that have been added to the guild listing.

See a list of all of your characters

Follow this link:  http://ostermark.com/my_characters

Write a journal entry

Once you have a character listed, you can start keeping an in-character journal.  To add a journal entry follow the link under the Create Content menu (left sidebar).  Click the radio button next to the character you are writing the journal for, then write up whatever  you want and save it.

Post on the forums

The forums here are very simple compared to most forum systems out there.  Be patient, and if there is a feature you are really missing, post it in the suggestions forum.

Add your own guide

Have you written up a nice lore article, or a guide (for example, "How to RPing shamans")?  Feel free to post it here.  To do that you will need to post it as a new Book Page.  Add it to the library category that best fits.  If none of them sound right, drop a note in the suggestion forum and we'll figure out a new category for it.

Add someone to your friends list

If you go to any members profile page, you'll see a "Create a Relationship with..." link.  Just click on that and fill out the simple form.  Once you've added them, all you need to do is click on the My Relationships link in the left menubar.  You can find other user by browsing the Member List or clicking on the author name of any post.

Leave a note on your friend's guestbook

If you go to any members profile page, you'll see a "Guestbook" tab.  Click on the tab and leave them a message!  If you need to send more private information, use the Send this user a message link at the bottom of their profile page.

Write a blog entry

Blogs are places where you can keep notes to yourself, rant about something ingame, out of game, or whatever you want to write about.  Write once a day, multiple times, or once every 3 months.  It's up to you.

Editing Your Profile

There are many options in your profile.  Most of them are self-explanatory, but here's some help if needed.

Account information  -- email and password  (note: you MUST enter the password to change anything)
Guestbook settings  -- allows you turn off your guestbook or set whether or not to email you when someone posts
Rich text editing settings -- allows you to set whether you want the rich text editor to show by default and other settings
Avatar information -- allows you to upload an 80x80 pixel image that will display on the forums and other places around the site
Optional Blocks -- allows you to turn off some of the optional information blocks (ie, the listing of new users)
Messaging and Notifications -- allows you to control if and when you gets emails
Contact Settings -- allows you to set whether or not other users can email you through a contact form (your email is not exposed ever)
Locale Settings -- this will let you set your location so timestamps on post display your local time.

EMAIL
Your email should already be here.  If you want to change it, type in the new one.  You will receive a new email that will need to be opened and the link inside clicked before you'll be able to post anything new to the site.

PASSWORD
You will need to enter your password in the first box if you change anything in your profile.  If you want to change your password, enter the new password in both boxes.

ENABLE/DISABLE GUESTBOOK
User guestbooks are enabled by default.  Guestbooks lets other users of the site post notes to you.  If you do not want to allow others to post to your guestbook, you can disable that by clicking the "disable" radio button.

EMAIL NOTIFICATION
You can toggle whether or not you want to receive emails when someone posts something new to your guestbook.  Click on the box to add a checkmark that indicates that you want emails, or click the checkmark off if you do not.

WELCOME MESSAGE
You can personalize your guestbook by posting a welcome message or banner.  Be as creative as you like!

Click on the "rich text editor settings" link to see the following options:

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Q  The colors on this site are awfully bright. How am I supposed to feel the Waaaaaaaaagh! here?
A  I'm going to make Destruction and Order themes for the site as soon as I have time.  I like darker sites myself, so a Destruction one will probably come next.

Q When I try to use standard forum formatting (BBCode), it doesn't work.
A I'm hoping to find a way to be able to switch between BBCode entry (for example, for images you'd do [img]url-to-img[/img]) and the FCKeditor options that are currently available.  I could do one or the other, but I think I'd have to crack out the code-book to allow people to switch between them.  The FCKeditor gives more formatting options than most BBCode packs, so that's what I went with.

About Phileas

Phileas is a Warhammer Online character on the Ostermark Server.  The player of Phileas (that would be me, *waves*) has been providing fansite support for MMO's since 2001 when she took a volunteer position with Warcry to help out their Dark Age of Camelot site. 

Back then I was known as Sneezy.  I worked with Warcry from 2001 until 2004 on various fansites for them, including DAoC, AC2, SWG, and their news Hub providing content and backend coding.

In 2005 I rolled on one of the first RP-PVP servers in World of Warcraft, Twisting Nether (TN) and was known as Mortica.  I had very little experience with RPers before TN, although I had done some D&D in High School and participated in collaborative story writing through AOL in the mid 90's.  I was amazed at the talent and creativity of some of the writers on TN and lamented the fact that the official Blizzard forums only kept posts for about 2 weeks.

And so The Twisting Nether Gazette (TNG) was born.  Initially it was just a forum with real life moderators who didn't tolerate the RP bashing that happened on the official forums and that gave writers a place to keep all of their writing in one place.  It had a hacky news page that most people never visted and some journaling features that nobody used.  But the forums exploded.  People were churning out incredible RP and making RP connections which lead to even more spectacular stories.  Since then, TNG has evolved and switched over to a vBulletin base and grown into the RP social networking behemoth that it is today.

vBulletin is a great system.  Very slick and polished.  However, the startup costs are prohibitive to my poor starving teaching salary, so when I decided that I liked Warhammer enough to create "WAR-TNG" I had to fish around for an alternative programming base.  After messing around with a dozen different things (SMF, Wordpress-Mu, Joomla, and many others) I finally decided on Drupal.  I fell in love with how clean and unrestricitve Drupal is and ended up spending over a month just messing around with a test site to learn as much as I could before I started creating The Ostermark Gazette (TOG).

Originally I had planned to post links to TOG a week or two after the game went live, but I kept thinking of newer and better things to add to the site.  I'm not sure if TOG will rival TNG ever.  They are very different sites with slightly different purposes.  I don't anticipate the same forum chatter as can be found on TNG.  Warhammer has the Warhammer Alliance and several other big name websites that essentially plays the part of the official forums for Blizzard, but they seem to be fairly on the ball as far as moderation goes, and posts aren't disappearing after two weeks.

I don't believe in competing with large sites.  I enjoyed my time with Warcry, but I'm happy catering to a small set of people where I can provide tools for RPers but not be so large as to require advertising to pay for the bandwidth.  I hope you enjoy the site, and let me know if you have any suggestions for improving it.