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Our mission:
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If you have any questions, suggestions, problems, criticisms, inquiries or praises, you can send a message directly to the site Administrator: Contact us.
We want everyone to have a good time and for VentSwap.com to be a safe place for people to communicate online. To ensure this standard we have rules in place for using the VentSwap.com site.
The procedure for the site moderation is as follows:
Non-registered visitors can search, browse our site pages and enjoy all the information that is available in these pages. However, as a member you will be able to:
To become a member, just fill out our very short application form. You will need to specify a username, a password, and a valid email address. Entering your email address will not leave you open to “Spam”, as you can choose to hide your email address.
We suggest that you get to know our vents categories, before starting a new vent. Every vent has to belong to a specific category. To read a complete description of all our categories, and the kinds of vents suited to each, have a look at the Categories page.
To start a new vent, just click on the "Start a New Vent!" link in your sidepanel, Choose a category that best describes what you would like to write about and just go from there!
One thing you should be aware of:
Sticky vents or topics appear always on top of all the other vents. They are often quite important or have useful information so you should read them where possible.
Closed vents or topics are set this way by either the site moderators or administrators. You cannot reply to closed vents or topics. Vents or topics may be closed for reasons like abusing, flaming, solved issues etc...
Administrators are people assigned the highest level of control over the entire site. These people can control all facets of site operation which include setting permissions, banning members, creating moderators, etc. They also have full moderator capabilities.
Moderators are individuals whose job it is to look after the running of the site and oversee all the posted vents from day to day. They have the power to edit or delete vents and close, re-open and move vents or topics. Generally moderators are there to prevent people going off-topic or posting abusive or offensive material. Becoming a moderator is usually a reward to members who are particularly active, helpful and knowledgeable.
Note: you may not be allowed to add your own thoughts to every vent, this may happen because:
To add your own thought to a vent, enter the vent's page, scroll to the bottom of it, until you see a field titled "Share your thought". Type your thoughtin there.
If you'd like to see what your thought will look like in the vent, without actually submitting it, click the "Preview post" button below the field. When you are ready to submit your comment, click the "Share your thought" button.
You can only edit your own vents or comments. To edit your vent or comment, simply click on the "edit" link. If all you are doing is correcting a typing mistake, well, that is certainly ok. But if you are actually replacing or deleting words, re-structuring your sentences, then this is definitely bad form, and you should not do it.
Don't panic! to reset your password, go to the sign in page. and click the "Forgot your password?" link to reset your password. You MUST enter a Username in the Username field before you use this feature and you will be sent instructions via email on how to reset your password.
You may change your password any time. All you need to do is click the "Account Settings" link in your sidepanel then on the next page click on "Change Password" and follow the instructions. (Keep in mind that passwords are case-sensitive.)
If you do not check the "Remember me" box when you sign in and you are inactive for over 30 minutes, you will be automatically signed out. This prevents misuse of your account by anyone else. To stay singed in, check the box during signing in. Note:this is not recommended if you access the site from a shared computer, e.g. library, internet cafe, university cluster, etc.
Private messages work a little like email, but are limited to registered members only. Registered members may send each other private messages. There are three links under your private message section. These are the "Inbox", the "Sent Messages" and "Send a Private Message".
VentSwap.com isn't a substitute for professional help. However, you may find that sharing your experience and connecting with others may makes you feel better. Our members may come from many different countries and may are different ages, each with different circumstances. As alone as you may feel, chances are that somebody else may identify with whatever you are going through.
We would greatly appreciate it if you invite your friends to our site and spread the word. This will help expose new people to our community and help us grow in popularity.
Smileys, or Emoticons, are small graphical images which can be used to express some feeling using a short code, e.g. :) means happy, :( means sad. The full list of emoticons can be seen here. Please try not to overuse smileys!
Your thoughts are usually entered as plain text, without any special formatting, such as bold or italics. However, if you want to, you can use Html option, a very common - and relatively easy to learn - markup language, used all over the world to design web pages.
Html is made up of a collection of 'tags' that programmers and designers use to let your browser know which chunks of text should be bold, which should be italic, and so on. For instance, let's say that you have the following sentence in one of your thoughts:
I love to vent
Now, let's say you want to make the word "vent" appear in bold so you type, like this:
I love to <strong>vent</strong> and it will appear in your thoughs like this:
I love to vent.
Here are some common Html tags, which you may find useful straight away:
If you use Html option you must click the "Format thought as Html" button, located under the thought field - or your formatting will not work.
Each member in our site has an Account page, where you can change your account settings, as well as add or change details about yourself. In you Account page, you can:
To access your Account page, click on the Account Settings link in your sidebar.
Please note, that you are not able to upload images to be used as icons or account pictures in our site. The images you wish to use must already exist and be available in another server, and you must have their full http address.
If you find that you are returning to a vent often, you might want to Bookmark it. To bookmark a vent, enter it, then click on the "Bookmark This Vent " link in your sidepanel.
Your can bookmark as many vents as you like. If you have bookmarked vents, you can access them all on a page of their own, by clicking the "Bookmarked Vents " link in your sidepanel.
If you no longer wish a discussion to be in your Bookmarks, enter it, then in your sidepanel select "Unbookmark This Vent ".
You can search for specific vents, thoughts or members in our site, by using the Search page. To go to the Search page, click on the Search link at the top of any page. Once in the Search page, just type one or more keywords into the Search field, select "Topics", ";Thoughts"; or "Members", then click "Search"!
You can view more advanced Search options by clicking on the "Advanced" link inside the Search page. This allows you to Search, for instance, for comments by a specific member. Try it out - it is useful.
You may notice that you can subscribe to your Search result pages using RSS feed! - so as others add thoughts to the site, you can be alerted automatically when the results of your search change!
You will notice that almost all pages in our site have a section in the sidepanel that says "Rss Feed". RSS is ways of checking for updated information on the web, without actually having to use your web browser. Many information-heavy web sites, such as online newspapers and blogs, use an "RSS feed" to let their users know if something has been updated, without forcing the users to actually come and visit the site.
A feed usually contains only a little summary of the full new articles or postings - usually just a headline, and the first line of the article or posting. Each feed article normally contains a link to the website that generated it, and clicking on that link will take you to the web page where you can read the full posting.This makes the feeds very fast and efficient, and makes it easier for you to decide if is worth your while visiting the website, and reading further.
To receive a feed from a site that generates them, you will need a program called a news aggregator. News aggregators often collect the updated news from several feeds, several sites, and display it to you in a simple, easy-to-read layout. If you never tried one, we suggest you download one for your computer - there are many free ones available.
Most of the web browsers - such as Firefox or IE7 - are also news aggregators. If you visit a page that has a feed, the browser often allows you to view the feed of the page, and also allows you to bookmark the feed itself.