We get many questions about site procedures and policies, along with lots and lots of "why" and "how come" questions about the site. This path of this book will answer some of those Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
If you have some question that you think belongs in this FAQ, just leave it as a comment to this page. The admin will then either answer it and add it to the FAQ or delete it.
To find content you have created -- anything from web pages to your participation in various forums -- do this:
1) Click on the "My Account" link, either in the menu to the left or in the bar at the top of the web page.
2) Then click on the "Track" tab.
When viewing the track tab you may think that it is also showing other people's content; not true. If you posted a comment to someone's forum topic or content, this will be listed as the original forum topic or content, not merely as your comment. This is done to make it easier for you to locate a specific topic item you might be thinking of.
This software powering this site is the Drupal content management system (CMS). It is free software licensed under the GNU GPL.
A Drupal user's manual is also available.
You don't know what a Zorkmid is?! This link will give you some background and history on the word.
Zorkmids are the site's currency.
You can earn zorkmids mainly by creating content. Some content created will earn you more zorkmids than other types of content.
The main purpose of zorkmids is to collect them and to show off how helpful you are and what an asset you are to the debianHELP community.
However, with that said I'm brainstorming ways to allow you to spend your zorkmids. That way you'll go broke and will have an incentive to earn more -- just like a real economy. :-)
Privacy policy?! Privacy on the Internet?!?!
The year is 2000-and-what? We're way past 1984 if that hasn't dawned on you. Big brother is here -- and you're just wrong if you're not bitching about it constantly to your gov't representitives.
The fact is that many governments monitor the Internet. Just what we know publicly about the US government's monitoring of the Internet should make your toes curl and renders this site's privacy policy as next to worthless.
But hey, I'll answer the question.
Here's the deal:
We need you to use cookies for login/customization purposes. Those cookies do not get sent to third parties, nor are they used by us to track your movements on the Internet nor to otherwise violate your privacy.
Any personal information stays with debianHELP and only debianHELP -- we don't sell or give away information on you.
If police show up and want information on you from this web site I will politely tell them to go piss up a rope and refuse to provide any information. I'll continue to tell them to piss up a rope right up to the time that they produce a valid court order. They'll then get your information because I'm not about to go to jail for you.
But be advised: If you post messages into the Imported debian.org Mailing Lists forums, that message will be sent out to the mailing list using the "from" address for the e-mail as the same e-mail address as you used on the web site here.
There are two possible reasons why blocks on the site will change and/or disappear:
1) Some blocks are area-specific. For example, when you enter the forums the left column of blocks will display a block containing recent/new forum topics. This block is only displayed while in the forums.
2) If the web server gets too busy, some blocks (and even some minor site features) will turn themselves off to save memory and CPU power for more essential parts of the web site. These blocks/features will turn themselves back on once the server is not so busy.
There are actually a couple of reasons.
First and foremost was the speed/system load/efficiency of the old software.
Add to that the fact that the new Drupal software had a wider range of features that would be useful on debianHELP, and that sealed it.
Of course, the idea of playing with a new toy never entered into the decision -- I swear.
Note that most of the old forum posts and articles were not moved over with the software switch; there are two reasons for this. The first is sheer laziness. Converting the data between sites could've been done, but it would not have been smooth and would have meant doing some kludges. I don't like kludges.
But more important was a licensing issue. About six years ago a decision was made to have posts to debianHELP made under the GNU Free Documentation License. Some people took great offense at that, especially when Debian's legal group declared the license to be non-free. (Note: This site is not an official part of Debian.)
With the site change a decision was made to have all content licensed under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Thus, the license for the old content cannot be changed by anyone except the person who created it. Sure, I could've closed my eyes and just converted it and probably no one would have cared; but that's shady.
So those two factors -- laziness and the license -- equalled leaving the old content where it was. We link to the old web site in an archived state so the content can be searched. And if you have content in the old site that you created that you think will help others, please feel free to copy it to this new site. Since you're the copyright holder, you can do that.