Appropedia Blogs

Why add forums?
Many folks find wikis a little intimidating. Many wiki pages are nicely formatted, well-structured and articulate. But if you have partially formed questions or ideas, or don't know wiki formatting (and maybe don't want to learn), then what?

Well, we value those questions and ideas! Appropedia content is not the encyclopedic stuff that you find at Wikipedia. We need discussion and argument and alternatives for different situations. Appropedia is about collaborating to find solutions, and that includes collaborating on identifying the problems. We want online brainstorming with everyone involved, whether you're a formatting expert or not. So: forums. And blogs are just selected forums where we will post thought provoking ideas.

As ideas develop on the unstructured forums (good for brainstorming), we will migrate the collective consensus content into structured articles (good for reading and learning) on the wiki. Because of this, all submissions here at the forums are also under the GNU Free Documentation Licenses. As we move the content, we will likely retire the forum threads that were used to develop the article content (but we'll need to work out the policies for that).

If I'm logged into the wiki or the forum, am I also logged into other area?
No. For now, the wiki and forum areas require separate login.

If I have a wiki account, do I need to create a new login ID?
Yes, for now. If you have an account on the wiki, please create an account of the same name here at the forums. This will help us recognize contributions between the two areas of Appropedia. In the future, the forums and the wiki will both support OpenID login. See "planned features" for more information.

What features are part of the forums?
We have added the ability to use some wiki formatting in forum postings. Here are the formatting features that have been added so far:
*Double brackets for wiki links, with or without "link text"
Example: [[User:Xyz]] will create a link labeled User:Xyz to the wiki user page for Xyz
Example: [[User:Xyz|my page]] will create the same link, but labeled "my page"
*Single brackets for external links, with or without "link text"
Example: (external without link text)
Example: (external with link text)
*Double apostrophes around text will make it ''italics''
*Triple apostrophes around text will make it '''bold'''
*5 apostrophes around text will make it '''''bold and italic'''''

Is there an easy way to create links within the forum?
The shorthand for creating links within the forum is:
[?:relative-url link text string]
- relative-url is the part of the url following ".org" in the complete url
- link text string is the string you want to appear as the link

Are more features planned?
The Drupal technology behind The Appropedia Forums makes it practical to consider a variety of interesting features. We are considering some of the following features. We'd appreciate it if you would post your thoughts at the Appropedia Forum Issues