The movement keeps growing, building steam, preparing for battle.

Doesn't a petition seem like "battle" to you? Oh well.

Meanwhile, we still have to find ways to communicate with our friends on h2g2. The new rules hinder communication, sometimes silence it altogether.

If we share all the tricks we discover for circumventing restrictions (without actually breaking any rules, mind you) it should be helpful to our group and to anyone else who dislikes the taste of leather and steel from their new BBC brand bridle.

(Note that some of these ideas are explicitly suggested by h2g2 staff, even shown in the House Rules.)

1. Anyone newly returned to h2g2 who finds their main bio page or old guide entries hidden can usually make them visible again by editing and updating them without making any changes.

2. If you value your writing, get in the habit of saving a copy on your computer before you try to post it on h2g2. Maybe it's just my ISP, or maybe it's just growing pains at h2g2, but I seem to get a lot of "timed out" messages when trying to read pages here. Data can be lost when this happens as you try to update a post. Saving copies will also help in case the piece gets moderated or eliminated -- you'll be able to easily post the information on some other, freer website.

3. Here's a workaround advocated in the House Rules. They emphasize that the rule against posting external URLs on message fora is currently imposed on a trial basis. "In the meantime, you might like to consider setting up a Guide Entry for you to put links on, and you can then put a link in the Conversations to that entry (as it is fine to include links to Guide Entries in Conversations)."

4. There is no satisfactory workaround¹ for showing off-site pictures on your personal page or guide entries. You'll have to settle for the pictures hosted by h2g2 (see the h2g2 Graphics Library) or else give text links to the URLs of off-site pictures you would have displayed.
UPDATE! As long as we're stuck with using only the stock images of the h2g2 image library, then we can at least stretch them to their maximum creative potential. By adding HEIGHT and WIDTH tags to your PICTURE code, you can stretch and shrink and resize images as you like.

5. When you want to mention a website in a forum, but you know it will be deleted, try listing an email address from that site instead. Then you can mention how the domain of that email is itself an URL. Then you can WINK INSANELY as if you have something caught in your eye.

6. Without a list of specific words that h2g2 judges as "profane," how are we to know which ones will get f****d up by the moderators? You can assume that George Carlin's classic list would keep you safe, but there have been rumors of Brit slang words like "arse" being moderated. In fact, I discovered by accident that the best way to find out if the word in question will be allowed is to type it in the search box at the top of the page and see how many other pages it may have been allowed in. "Scunthorpe" appears to be acceptable, as long as you don't leave off six of those letters.

I even found two pages that contain the word "f**k," although I assume these have either slipped by moderators, or else they have been allowed due to "editorial exceptions" because they were used in some allegedly artistic or historic context. I still say every letter and every numeral and every bit of punctuation used by any intelligent being on this website should qualify as "ART," and should thereby be exempted from the juvenile-on-the-part-of-those-who-still-care-enough-to-censor-it sweary-words rule. But at least I figured a way to check the words that we cannot use, about which we cannot be forewarned because that would require them to be used in the warning.

7. Add illustrations to your page using ASCII art. Almighty Rob has made a great page called The ASCII Uprising giving tips on how to add text drawings in GuideML language, and describes software you can download to convert your graphic images to ASCII art.

8. Try wingdings and webdings as illustrations. I never thought about it much, but most readers will be able to view wingding fonts if you incorporate them into your h2g2 pages. See this explanation from The Post.

9. Twinkle has made an awesome little program at http://www.geocities.com/dragondreamer.geo/ that allows you to create graphics through tables. By filling in dots of color on a big grid, it will translate your picture into an HTML table, which can then be inserted in your Guide ML page. I assume the moderators will still hide it if they feel your "table" displays an obscene or copyrighted picture, but I've seen these tables on several other pages throughout h2g2, so it looks safe to use innocuous images this way.


I've tried my hand at creating some graphics this way. Check out the results at the Zaphodista Table Smileys page. [Sorry, but these only show up if you're using Internet Explorer. I'll try to update them if we find a way to make them compatible with Netscape.]

53. The Ultimate Workaround: sign the Petition for Greater Freedom on h2g2 to show how you feel about the new BBC restrictions. (You could also join the Zaphodistas outright, if you're that kind of brazen and boisterous character.)

79. Your suggestion here! Please post your ideas for tricks and workarounds in a forum below, so this Workaround Guide will grow.

See Zaphodista Communiqués page
for the latest developments.