Diaspora/Website

Adding a poll

The icon at the bottom right of the publisher that looks like a graph enables you to add a poll to your post. Click it and a box will open into which you can enter a question you want to poll people on, and two or more answers for them to give. Each time you enter an answer in the last field, another will appear below, so you can give as many answer options as you like.

That is all there is to know about the buttons and icons on the publisher. The real magic happens within the publisher itself. As well as plain text, you can format your text, add #tags, @mentions and links, and embed photos, videos and audio. Wow!

There’s a lot you can do to make your text more varied: bold, italics, large headings and so on. Most of this formatting can be done using the buttons above the publisher – you don’t need to worry about that messy code.

To add <em>italic</em>, <strong>bold</strong>, or inline code, highlight the text you want to format and click the relevant button from the row above the publisher window. The Markdown code for this formatting will be placed around this portion of text.

To create a heading, list or quotation, place your cursor on the line you want to format, and press the relevant button.

Want to include a link in your post? Just click the <span class="click">link</span> button and paste the link URL into the pop-up which appears. This will enter the URL into your post, wrapped in Markdown link code. Type the text you want to appear in your message over the highlighted text in square brackets.

If you want to include a bare link into your message, simply paste the URL into the publisher and it will automatically be converted into an inline link. You don’t need to use Markdown unless you want the link to look fancy!

Images

Embedding an image from the web into your message is similar to including a link. Click the <span class="click">image</span> button above the publisher window, and paste the URL of the image into the pop-up which appears.  This will enter the URL into your post, wrapped in Markdown image code. Type some “alt text” (the text you want to appear in your message if the image can’t be displayed) over the highlighted text in square brackets. You can also add an optional title, which will be displayed as a tool-tip when the cursor is moved over the image.

Note: For this to work, you must provide a direct link to a valid image file (ending in .jpg, .gif, .png or similar), <em>not</em> to a web page with an image or images on it.

diaspora* uses a simple mark-up system called Markdown. If you want to do anything not covered by the formatting buttons, you can find more about how to use Markdown in %{format_link}.

To help diaspora* pods perform faster, your stream won’t be constantly reloaded automatically. Just refresh the page whenever you want to check for updates to your stream.

When you hover over any post in the stream, several icons will appear at the top right-hand corner of the post. These allow you to do some useful things:

Enable/disable notifications

Next to the x is a little bell icon. If the bell is gray, that means you aren’t currently receiving notifications of activity on this post. Click it to turn the bell black, and you will now receive notifications for this post. If you’re already receiving notifications and no longer want them, click the bell to turn it from black to gray.

Report someone’s post

If you believe a post contravenes your pod’s code of conduct, for instance if you believe it is abusive or is spam, you can click the report icon (an exclamation point in a triangle). This will bring up a report form, which will be sent to your pod’s admin. Please make sure you’re aware of your pod’s terms of service before reporting a post. You can find a link to your pod’s <span class="click">Terms of service</span> in the sidebar.

There are five tabs on the account settings page: <strong>Profile</strong>, <strong>Account</strong>, <strong>Privacy</strong>, <strong>Services</strong> and <strong>Applications</strong>.

On this page you can change, add to or delete any of your profile information. Go back to the end of %{part_link} if you want a reminder of how to edit it. Don’t forget to press the <span class="click">Update</span> button at the bottom once you’re finished!