Welcome New Users

Welcome, New Users, to The Daily Kos.  This Diary is intended to help you orient yourself to the site and ask questions about how to use it.

In the Body you will find some links intended to get you participating more effectively.  Also in the Body this week is a discussion of Comments Bookmark and Searches.

After that you can ask me any question you want.  I don't know all the answers so if you stump me, you do.  I invite those wiser than I to contribute and correct (or raise a ruckus, just don't scare people).

No permission slips needed, join us at the deep end of the pool for adult swim.

Hello Devil.  Welcome to Hell.

If your user id (hover your mouse over your name in any comment, look at the status bar in the bottom of your browser) is larger than 159370 you probably haven't had to opportunity to participate in one of my Welcome New Users diaries.

There are 13 of them that I consider the New Users Guide and I encourage you to take a look at the table of contents at least so you can see what kind of information is already available.

Comments Bookmark

Over the last couple of weeks I've heard some frustrations with the way things work.  Little things that I've mostly addressed before as part of larger topics so they may have been overlooked like this one- "Is there an easier way to review your comments than going 'Your page/Comments' tab?"

Well, yes and I've outlined it in History when I talk about the 'Comments' tab but perhaps a review is in order because you should use it a lot.

Go to 'Your page/Comments'.  Set Results: 50.  Search.

Now Bookmark it.

From now on when you log in to surf dKos, remember to open up your 'Comments Bookmark'.  You have to manually refresh it, it doesn't automatically update every time you make a new comment or get a new reply.  Use the number of replies you get to see if there are any new ones that might need a response.

Because I use a tabbed browser I keep this bookmark in the same folder I keep my dKos homepage and a few other frequently used tools and open them all automatically every time I log on.  IE users have to suffer with seperate windows.  I talk about this technique in Bookmarks and Tabbed Browsing.

Searches

Another question involved Search.  Someone wanted to chase down their first diary in a series.  While your first inclination might be to click on their name and start hitting the next button there are more reliable ways to find this information.

After you get to 'Search' (which I always do by creating a new instance of my 'Comments Bookmark') you're going to want to replace your name with the name of the person you want to search.  Do this by typing |author="Target Handle"| in the Search: box.  Add a distinguishing characteristic like a key word or phrase (if a phrase enclose it in quotes) or perhaps a unique tag using the 'tag="Unique Tag"' operator.

In this case I used a keyword because I happened to know that there wasn't an appropriate tag.

Find: Stories and Diaries, Sort by: Time, From: 3 years, To: now, Search.

272 Results.

Now this was exactly what I expected because I was searching a prolific diarist, but if you get unexpectedly large or small results look carefully at your Search criteria for tightening and loosening.  If you don't get any at all there's probably an error in your time settings or your search string.

A quick glance at the titles was enough to tell me I was on the right track and 6 scroll clicks on the 'Next' button and I was back at the beginning of time.  I zoomed in on the last one and it sure seemed like what I was trying to find.  Swipe the URL and mission accomplished.

You can find all sorts of interesting things with 'Search' as I've mentioned in Mirrors and Community Moderation I.  If you are going to be looking through someone's comments you should use Indexed Search ('Comments' not 'Comments by') and the |author=""| construction otherwise you will only see the last 2 weeks of activity or so (older comments are archived and no longer visible to the scoop original Database Search).

Speaking of dates you can limit your Searches to a specific year, month, or day by using the |sid=""| operator.  Want to know how many comments were posted a year ago and other useless trivia?

Search says 17104.

A few points of interest-

• You have to make sure your From: and To: parameters include the date you're looking for, otherwise you'll get no result.


• Using an sid construct effectively overcomes the Search engine's reluctance to include "everything" (can't leave the Search: field blank).


• The farther back in time you look, the more reliable the Results number gets.  Before comments get archived they are easily included more than once in the indexes.  The Results number is based on the number of index entries before duplicates are discarded.