Stampchat+

Welcome!

This board welcomes and encourages meaningful discussion among members of the philatelic community.

Posting Policies:

As a member of that community, please make your remarks in a positive and courteous manner. Although there are subjects in philately upon which reasonable people can and do disagree, please do so in a professional and polite manner.

By either reading or posting on this board:

- you agree that the individual poster is responsible for his or her posts;

- you agree that the host of this board, its administrators and other designees are not in any way liable for posts made to this board;

- you agree that your only recourse is to no longer read and/or post to the board. No other remedies are available to you.

Posting Guidelines:

Please post links to images rather than the images themselves.

You may post a link to an online auction. If the purpose of your post is to comment favorably on an auction, so much the better, If the purpose of your post is to criticize an auction, please explain your reasons. Please do not name the seller explicitly in your post, nor draw conclusions about the seller's intent, motives or behavior. But please do explain why you believe the stamp or offering differs from the description. In this way other board members can learn from your knowledge and research.

Thanks!

In order to strike a balance between the "living room" feel of a single, unthreaded discussion board, like the original "StampChat", and the capabilities available in powerful discussion board software, here is the organizational strategy for this new version of StampChat.

One Board, One Room, One Discussion:

Please make all posts through the main board entitled "StampChat: Today's Discussion". This board consists of one master topic (or "thread"). The discussion progresses chronicially. (Please note that you can set a preference specifying whether the board runs in chronological or in reverse-chronological order.)

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when composing your posts:

Key Words:

Please make sure to include key words in your post or in replies you make to other posts. This allows a reader to subsequently do a search on say, "Japan" or "illegals", and find all the posts pertaining to that subject, whether specifically archived or not. This is a powerful feature, and the better our posts are composed to take full advantage of this feature, the greater a research tool it becomes for everyone.

Thus, even if you just reply to someone else's post about a CSA forgery, please make sure that those words appear somewhere in your post. Also, please make sure to avoid posts such as: "Does anybody know anything about this country?" Unless it's written in a script you can't identify, please include the name of the country in your post.

Multiple Subjects, Multiple Posts:

Because there is no limit to the number of posts, please break up posts on different topics into different posts. In other words, if your post addresses several different subjects, please create one post for each subject. If you are replying to several different posts, please, when feasible, break those up into individual posts. Why?

This board also contains a powerful archiving capability. A few days after the original posts are made, the posts pertaining to "archive-worthy" subjects will be moved into their own self-contained topic (or "thread") in the StampChat archives. This will allow subsequent readers to the board to click on a particular topic of interest and follow that particular discussion.

Thus, it's important that your original post addresses only one major subject, so that, if archived, it will pertain only to that topic. It is not possible to "split" a post across several different topics, and hence the need to keep an individual post focused on a specific topic. Therefore, multiple posts on multiple subjects by a single poster are welcomed and strongly encouraged.

(This approach is the diametrical opposite to the approach on the eBay Stamp Discussion board, where only the 200 most recent posts are available, and thus posters combined several diifferent subjects into one post, in order to prevent older posts from scrolling off until the last possible moment.)

Conclusion:

With a little practice, it will become second nature to adjust our posting styles to take full advantage of this board's software capabilities. As always, there's so much to learn ... so little time!

Here's a detail I may have overlooked:

How to Post:

Just click on the "post reply" button at the upper left. This will keep all the posts in the same "topic".

Just like before, feel free to jump in. There are usually several different discussions running simultaneously, so a comment on one doesn't end the discussion on the others.

Sort order of posts

Mauro made some changes to try to help solve the mystery of where you get sent after you make a post.

We tested it with me, and it works beautifully. Hopefully everyone else will have the same experience.

There's one critical step that everyone needs to make:

• Go to your Profile. (You can click on it above.)
  
  
• Scroll most of the way down. There'll be an option that wasn't there before: "Posts sort by:" You can then click on a box that checks either "Oldest first" or "Newest first". (Moi, I like the newest first.)
  
  
• Hit "submit" and you're done.

Once you've done that, in the future, after you've submitted a post, and you click on the link to take you to it, it should do just that. And also, if you do nothing at that message window, in about 2 seconds you are redirected to your new post anyway.

This is one of several fixes and improvements Mauro is furiously working on. Hopefully each of them will improve everyone's ease of use with the board.

Please let us know if this particular fix doesn't seem to work for you.

Thanks!

User Tip 1:

For those people who are reading the board and want to join in the discussion, but are not sure exactly which of the many buttons on here to push, it's the one that looks like this:

at the upper left part of the page.

Come on in!

User Tip 2:

The system does a good job of keeping track of which messages you haven't read yet.

When you get to this page, the messages that are new since the last time you loaded or refreshed the page have a little next to the "Posted:" time & date.

If you've already read them, it looks like this instead.

User tip #3:

Editing your posts

You can edit your posts long after you've posted them. To do this, click on the button at the upper right-hand corner of the "cell" your post is in. Takes you right back to the composing window, where you can have another go at it.

User Tip #4: "Showing" your email address

When you click on your "Profile" link (one of the choices at the top of every page), the first preference you can change is: "Always show my e-mail address". Many of us have this option turned off, as we have learned about email-harvesting bots and their ilk.

However, I have learned that "show" is not really the right term. If you click "yes" to that question in the profile, what it does is make the button appear, both in the member list and alongside your posts.

This is not as dangerous as it first appears.

Mauro has carefully made sure that your actual email address itself never appears anywhere. In fact, if you hover over a (a "live" one, not the ones contained within this post), you'll see that it does not show the email address, but rather a cryptic reference to something else.

If you have email enabled in your profile, then that means that someone on here can send you an email, instead of using the "private message" capability. Although the "pm" feature is nice, it means you have to come here and be logged onto the board to know that someone was trying to reach you. It's much more likely that you're checking your own email more freqeuntly than that.

Hopefully, this explanation will help people feel a little more comfortable about setting their preferences to "show their email address.