Sometime in the spring/summer of 1997 was when Death Duck and Ace Rimmer moved their regular postings on the Discussion board over to the Buzz, and shortly thereafter was when Penny and Kathryn showed up for the first time.
We all arrived at different times during that first year, but are nonetheless considered "the first wave" of Buzzers: Death Duck, Ace Rimmer, Penny, Kyle Riker, Kathryn, Kurn, Cmdr. Valak, Spot, jSarek, Tomalak of Borg, Vice Admiral Dan, The Ninja Scot, Richard Castillo, Intendant Kira and Defiance. (If we neglected to mention your name here and you were around back at that time, please let us know.)
Read the history of the Buzz to find out. (Note: the history begins on the home page. There is some recent history that isn't covered here yet...it'll come when I have time.)
In the beginning, both the Star Trek and Star Wars off-topic boards were called "The Buzz," however, they evolved into completely different message boards, both with completely different atmospheres. (Note: We're not trying to start a ST vs. SW debate here, we're just telling you what we've observed.) If you take a jaunt over to the SW OT board, you'll be surprised (or maybe not-so-surprised) to find many, many "hello" and "nt" posts with not much substance to them. They have their own set of rules, it seems, which make discussion more fast paced than the ST OT board. This, in some ways, may be the result of different "powers that be" at Decipher watching over the different message boards. Major Rakal has kept a pretty strict eye on the Star Trek boards, and that has helped us retain some of the sanity that should be displayed in these public forums, and all us true Buzzers should thank the Major for that (and all the other Monitors out there who help keep the ST boards cleaner than the SW, YJ and AP boards). But it's also due to the fact that we have people on the Buzz, who aren't Decipher employees or volunteers, who work hard to keep it clean and who try to get things back to the way we remember it.
As suggested in the previous question's answer, if you take a look at the SW OT board, you'll very rarely see any surveys. You know our answer to that fact? They don't know what they're missing! :-) Surveys allow us to get to know the other posters better and for a greater bond as a community. And, of course, the SW OT board never has been honored with the presence of Penny, who started the survey craze on the ST Buzz. NOTE: As of September 21, 2000, all non-Trek surveys will disappear from the retitled ST Miscellany board, since Decipher rearranged their board policy and cracked down on those types of posts, which included most of the surveys.
We find that many people ask this. ;-) Us "old-timers" constantly say "The Buzz this..." and "The Buzz that...", yet many don't know what we're referring to. The Buzz is the original name of the Star Trek CCG Off-Topic message board (now known as the Star Trek Miscellany board) at Decipher. This is explained in greater detail in the history of the Buzz section.
We're glad you asked. :-) It's because we want the Buzz to be like it used to be, with meaningful messages that people actually enjoy reading and replying to, surveys that let us get to know everyone else and queries that relate to the Star Trek CCG. That's what the Buzz was intended for and we intend to keep it that way. So, if you plan on posting a string of pointless messages on the Buzz, just keep in mind that we're watching and you can be sure you'll hear about it if you do. ;-)
You can take a trip over to what we call The New Buzz. There you can discuss almost any topic you want without fear of it being censored or deleted.
Colons appear in the message dialog box when you post a followup up on a message; those lines are quoting the previous document. The owner of the WWWBoard can decide whether they wish to enable or disable the quoting of previous messages.
No, you can only use HTML tags in the message body of the post. It will not work in any other fields. The maintainer of the script has the option of allowing or disallowing any HTML in the Message part of your posting. If it is disallowed, the script will just throw out everything in <>'s. If it is allowed, your HTML will appear in the posting.
One explanation is because your browser did not reload or refresh the page, it simply pulled it out of cache. Please reload your browser and it should then appear.
Yes, unless it was removed because of a board rules violation, as in the case of flames. messages that are deleted from the index page remain on the server for about two months before they are removed. messages deleted from a thread can still be viewed and responded to. You can search for a post that has been deleted from the index page using the Search function.
No. A decision was made by board moderators to not allow editing of messages. Once a post is made it cannot be changed except by the board maintainer. A Preview button is provided so you can review and edit your post before it becomes permanent.
Sure! The important thing to remember when doing HTML is that most (but not all) of the tags come in pairs, a starting-closing combination. The closing tag is the same as the starting tag but with a "/". Everything after the starting tag will have the tag effect and the slash says to "turn it off." The most commonly used tag pairs in messages are bold, italic and underline. Following are the tags that will produce these effects. HR and IMG are examples of codes that do not require a closing tag. These codes have a "/" built right into them to be "self-turning off".
| HTML Tag: | Effect of Tag in your Message: |
| <b>This is bold text.</b> | This is bold text. |
| <i>This is italic text.</i> | This is italic text. |
| <u>This is underlined text.</u> | This is underlined text. |
| <font color="red">This is red text.</font> | This is red text. |
| <hr /> |
The HR tag makes a line across 75% of the page, centered. Upper or lower case does not matter for HTML coding, but consistency is important. Keep to all upper or all lower case. Here is a link to a site that teaches simple HTML tags. And here is a complete list of HTML tags and their syntax. Note that the effect of HTML tags may not be what you expect if it is modified by the website's stylesheet.
Yes.
<img src="http://pathname/filename" />where pathname/filename is a gif, png or jpg file uploaded onto the Internet. In order to have text wrap around the image, use this command:
<img align="left" src="http://pathname/filename" />where alignment can be left, right or center.
<a href="http://pathname/filename">Title for the Link</a>where pathname/filename is the URL of a webpage on the Internet. Every anchor tag requires a Title for the Link. Without a title, there will be nothing to link to.