Stuff about articles

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I'm putting the finishing touches on a new article, so the CPA can avoid having gone another full year without another frontpage update (but seriously, I may or may not do a series unrelated to this that would mean a lot more content). Anyway, because I am inept, I find the old-fashioned interface for submitting articles to be trickier than the more intuitive interface used here in the forums. Turgy did explain that [*IMG] and [*/IMG] could be used as tags on an image URL to put that image in an article. But I have other questions and I don't know that we have any resource for this sort of thing. So that's what I was hoping for. A resource. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. It could even be just this thread.

What kind of stuff can I do using the current article submission box? What are the tags I can use to do stuff that I might want to do? In particular, italics, underline, and block quotes are all things I was looking to include in my article.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I believe you can use the same tags for those as you can in the forum; i.e. [b*] [/b*] (without the *). The only tag I remember being weird is the [url*] tags for links, but if you don't have a lot of them, I can correct them once I get the article.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Alright, that's simple enough that even I can probably get it right. Let's see.
This is a block quote. Even though I don't really have to, I'm putting enough text in here that this would stylistically be a block quote, as I am neurotic. It's pretty silly. I mean, this isn't even a quote. I'm not actually quoting anyone at all. I'm just typing words and putting tags around those words. I was going to find some old post by Spiderman and use a quote from him, but I decided that I was too lazy for that. Most of Spiderman's posts are pretty short anyway, so they wouldn't work. To compound the problem, none of those posts I looked through were ones that piqued my interest. Then again, I am pretty tired. I stayed up way too late last night. Yeah, it's looking like this block quote isn't going anywhere, but at least it hopefully turns out to be a block quote when I preview it.​
Well, that worked. I remembered that I could turn off the rich text editor, because even I have the requisite knowledge to pull that one off. Apparently the tags for blockquotes are [*INDENT=1] and [*/INDENT] (without asterisks, of course). Will that one work for articles too? If I find that a tag works in forum posts, am I probably safe using it in articles (other than possibly the URL tag issue)?
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I don't think anyone's used the indent tag in an article before, so not sure if it will work or not. I guess just try it and we'll see how it turns out :) Same goes for other tags; I assume they work but won't know until I see it.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
So we are treading in unknown territory now. It is a mystery. We are getting empirical about this, Spiderman. We are doing science.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Article submitted just now. Hopefully the tags work. If not, hopefully Spiderman can fix them. It's kind of long, so I feel a bit guilty about that. I think it's way longer than anything the front page has had in a long time. I'm probably going to start writing articles more regularly, but they won't be as long as this one.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
I don't remember having any problems with URL tags. You just have to remember to put the address in quotation marks, like so:
Code:
[url="http://www.casualplayers.org"]This site sucks[/url]
Then again, I think the formatting on all my old articles is screwed up now anyway. If I recall correctly, the tags basically followed the standard used in some version of vBB, which is what shows up here. I don't think I ever used block quotes, but all the simple stuff should come up okay.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Wait, so if I use the "code" tag, I can put whatever tags I want in, and it won't apply the tags? It's like a "put this in plain text" tag?

Code:
[B]Apparently.[/B]
Mind blown.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
turgy22 said:
I don't remember having any problems with URL tags.
Well, it's not a "problem", it's just that it differs from the forum where you don't have to use the quotes.

I also didn't know about the code tag... I use it in another forum but to keep actual code formatted, never thought about using it to demonstrate "simple" tags like bold or underline :D
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Okay, the article's up (thanks!) and it turns out there's some documentation on the form where I put it up (why it's not on the article submission page, I don't know). Only four tags are listed and they are:
Code:
[b][/b]
[i][/i]
[url="foo"][/url]
[color="foo"][/color]
So not sure when the img or quote tag was added or if they were always available and Ed just didn't put them on there or what.

So I changed the indent tags to quote tags and just removed the underline tags. If you want to change them to something else, let me know.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Okay, the article's up (thanks!) and it turns out there's some documentation on the form where I put it up (why it's not on the article submission page, I don't know). Only four tags are listed and they are:
Code:
[b][/b]
[i][/i]
[url="foo"][/url]
[color="foo"][/color]
So not sure when the img or quote tag was added or if they were always available and Ed just didn't put them on there or what.

So I changed the indent tags to quote tags and just removed the underline tags. If you want to change them to something else, let me know.
Ah, I'll use quote tags and bold tags instead of indent and underline in the future, then. Speaking of the submission page...

Apologies for being a pedant, but does your administrator magic let you change that submission page? It appears to be something from the previous century. I'm being rather silly here, since we're probably the only two people that have even seen the submission page in over two years.

Please stick to Magic, or the whole CCG market. No Pokemon related articles will be printed (as in decks, strategy; feel free to rant about how WotC messed up Magic with Pokemon)
I wasn't at the CPA in 2000 or 2001, but I'm pretty sure Pokemon-related articles aren't a problem anymore. And anyone writing a rant about Pokemon's effect on Magic is either a major Magic history buff or totally insane. I'm not worried about the article submission page making this look like a stagnant site or anything like that, because hey, if the shoe fits...

But this other thing makes me cry...

Grammar. Please check your article for grammatical and spelling errors before you submit it. That will make your article be posted faster.
Most importantly, have fun! We\'re casual players, but if you want to write about the PT, go for it!
No! Backslash, why do you have to be so close to the apostrophe key? Dreaded QWERTY strikes again. If only the person that wrote guideline #6 had listened to the person that wrote guideline #3, this could have been avoided.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Please stick to Magic, or the whole CCG market. No Pokemon related articles will be printed (as in decks, strategy; feel free to rant about how WotC messed up Magic with Pokemon)
I think we should do away with this rule. I played a very interesting game of Jenga last weekend and wrote an article about it, only to find out that I wasn't allowed to post it here. (Also, I couldn't post it to the Casual Jenga Players Alliance, as their editorial standards are much higher than here.)
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I think Rando wanted this rule gone too, as part of his effort to expand the site from just Magic to all sorts of games...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Yeah, I remember that someone wanted to expand the site like that. I don't particularly have such ambitions. It's just that Pokemon was a big issue for Magic players and discussions of Wizards of the Coast, but that was over a dozen years ago. Pokemon passed Magic up as the most popular CCG and Magic players reacted to that in various ways. There was concern that Wizards of the Coast was abandoning the playerbase that had supported them for years in favor of this new fad. Supposedly Pokemon was the force behind selling out to Hasbro, as it was felt that Wizards of the Coast wasn't a big enough company to handle the foreseen drop in Pokemon's popularity and its financial effects (that was the version Peter Atkinson presented anyway, and I'm not aware of any claims to the contrary). So it's just kind of funny. The stuff on the submission page was probably written (or last updated) in 2001 or so (the link to the article on Star City Games is from 2000) when Pokemon was still a big deal for Magic players. It's not a current issue for WotC. Nintendo fully took over the Pokemon TCG a decade ago.
 

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
Well this is the Casual Players site, so I don't see a problem with a few articles about other games. Heck a few articles would be a freash change.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Is it possible to embed a YouTube video into an article here? I was going to just link to it, but it occurred to me that embedding is a thing and that other people do it...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Well, I've decided to just link to the video. Article will be submitted shortly, once I double-check the tags.
 
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