h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... and welcome to h2g2 - again.

I'm one of the <./>ACEs</.> (Assistant Community Editors) who volunteered to help show people around the site. As a self-professed former h2g2 user and student of computer science I suspect you don't need any help but I thought I'd drop by just in case.

IF you have a question
THEN click on the reply link below and I'll be back
ELSE feel free to ignore this message

Hi SEF Thanks for the warm welcome and despite my 3rd attempt no doubt I'll have some questions at some point Oh and I liked your reference to an IF..ELSE loop

Infact I have a question right now.. are you allowed to link to images outside of h2g2?

That rather depends on what you mean by a link and what sort of image.

You are allowed to post links people can follow to anything off-site (in plain text or GuideML although the techniques differ) as long as that thing is itself safe. For example, you shouldn't be getting people to download a computer virus or pornography or even jump to a non-existent address. It must also not be your whole purpose to be an advert for an external site. Adverts are very non-BBC and are also rather against the idea of h2g2 being a community of researchers. Pointing out things which people might find interesting is perfectly OK and that does include images (barring obviously offensive ones).

To make a link in plain text just type the full address starting with http and the parser should automatically turn it into a link. Use the preview button to check it as you can't fix it after posting.

To make an off-site link in GuideML you need a line like:
BBC home page
which also demonstrates the plain text parser admirably.

Right, gotcha, so putting a link to my own, external site is ok too? As for images, I know I can't upload to here (which is a shame) but is there one page on h2g2 where I can see the numbers are for all the 'blobs'?

There isn't just one page. There are far too many blobs for that. Besides which for people to see the images the files would take ages to download on one page. There are already far too many on some pages. Not everyone has broadband or is on the same network like the staff! So they probably didn't realise there was much of a problem until the digibox users came along and kept running out of memory.

Anyhow, you could start at the <./>GuideML-PictureLibrary</.> and work through the categories if you know what type of thing you want. Other than that, I've been compiling a more comprehensive list with descriptions off-site and now run a blob finding service at A999994.

Thankyou Well I should really say a HUGE thankyou, you have been very helpful indeed!