Mastering Gather: The SiteWizard™ for Sunday, 02/17

Removing yourself as a member from multiple Gather groups or eliminating more than a few connections can be fairly cumbersome and time-consuming. You can significantly speed up this process however by using tabbed browsing and the Ctrl Key (Windows), or the CMD Key (Mac), in addition to other keyboard shortcuts.

In most browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari), pressing the Ctrl or CMD key while clicking any link will open that link in another browser tab. This allows you to quickly open many links from within a single web page, article or mail message. Also, pressing the Ctrl key while hitting the Tab key will toggle your display between these open tabs. Using these techniques in combination can greatly reduce the amount of time typically necessary when spring-cleaning your groups, connections, and content.

Here's how:

• Go to the page displaying the groups that you are a member of.

• Press the Ctrl or CMD key while clicking the "remove" link beneath the icon for the group you want to remove yourself from.

• This opens the "Leave this Group" confirmation page in another browser tab.

• Repeat the steps above for each group you want to remove yourself from. You may increase the number of groups displayed per page by following the instructions provided in this SiteWizard article.

• After you have selected all groups that you wish to leave, press (and hold) the Ctrl key while clicking the Tab key. This will toggle you to each browser tab you have just opened. You can now quickly and easily click the orange 'Remove' button on each confirmation page as you toggle from tab to tab. Note: You do not need to wait for the removal to be complete before moving on to the next tab.

• Repeat the process above for removing connections and deleting articles, among other typically tedious tasks on Gather.

Tomorrow's Tip ...CATEGORIZING your groups on the publishing page!

"Some of my mail messages on Gather end up with unusual characters or symbols in them, like â€Â or “. This makes my messages more difficult to read. I didn't add these symbols and I don't want them appearing, so what causes this, and what can I do to prevent them?"

This is often caused when text containing a quotation mark or apostrophe is copied from Microsoft Word™ or other word processing programs. Some of these programs use special formatting for their quote marks called 'Smart Quotes' or 'Curly Quotes'. These punctuation marks are not recognized by Gather, and thus will most often be the cause of errant symbols when copying text into a mail message.

To rectify this in Microsoft Word, turn off 'smart quotes' temporarily. You can toggle this feature on or off in Word through the following menu options:

Tools ⇒ AutoCorrect Options... ⇒ AutoFormat As You Type

Then, make certain "Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes" is NOT selected.

Note: If you have already begun typing your message in Word, and have used an apostrophe (') or quotation mark ("), you will need to either retype these characters with 'smart quotes' turned off, or use the Replace (F5) function to replace all current quote marks and apostrophes with new ones.

The steps for adjusting the appearance of punctuation marks will vary for other word processing programs you may use. Your program may have an option for removing all formatting from your text, and this can often be the easiest solution.

Gather's current 10 point (star) rating system is a heavily debated and often reviled feature in the community. The rating of content does not directly generate points, and rating ability can be turned off or limited to members in your network.

What additional options or changes would you like to see regarding the rating of content? ...or do you feel that there is little, if any, value in this feature?