New to Gather? - Have a Question? or Need Help?

Commencing Monday, The 'Sunday Help Series' will become the 'Member Help Series', and will be published daily. This will hopefully provide greater coverage during the remainder of the week, and allow more members to participate in the answering of member questions.

The new article will be published by the 'Member Guide to Gather'. :-)

Kevin, this is great. I hope many take advantage of the Help Series.

Thanks Beth! Have a great day!

Great idea, Kevin, this is featured in Post what doesn't FIT anywhere else! so hopefully more people will see this - we ALL need help, from my various questions on here, it's pretty obvious!
I have one question. I know that you can send mail BCC'd to your connections from your email box, using Compose and the BCC feature - how about from your individual groups? Is that possible and if it is, how is it done?
Thanks,
Marilyn

Marilyn,

It is interesting that you should bring this up, as the 'Gather Tip of the Day' deals with Gather Group Mail, and a glitch which causes all group members to be listed as recipients.

When sending a 'Group Mail' message, all recipients should be hidden. Instead, you should see the group name appear in the 'To' field.

Do you want to hide the group name? ...or are you experiencing the glitch which causes group members to be listed?

Sounds like exactly what i need - the "missing manual." Thanks, Kevin.

★ ★ ★ Today's HTML Tip ★ ★ ★

The HTML tip for today will demonstrate how to 'strikeout' words or phrases in your articles on Gather, like this:

Look for this tip later today!

How can I un-make someone a contact? I have a contact who just can't stop yapping.

Hey Kevin,
It's me again, being a gather 'damsel in distress'. After realizing all my gather articles come up via the internet with anyone that googles me, I changed from my real-name to "Laptop Dancer" (I write some pretty personal stuff that I'm not sure I want ANYONE to be able to read). Anyway, I googled my name again, and it appears that everything still comes up under my name....even stuff I write under my alter-ego, "Laptop Guy". (This could get embarrassing since "Laptop Guy" is my bad-boy-laptop-alter ego... ;-) ) Do you know how I can prevent my articles from being available on the internet or associated with my real name?

Joseph,

To remove a person as a connection:

1) Click the 'People' tab on the main navigation/menu bar above.

2) This should display a list of your connections.

3) Under the icon/avatar for each of your connections you should see a link titled 'Remove' (it is very faint and sometimes hard to spot).

4) Locate the icon/avatar for the member you want to remove.

5) Click the 'Remove' link under their image. This will allow you to remove this member as a connection.

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Tame your article fonts! - Click HERE to learn how.

Yvette,

This can be a difficult question to answer because there are many variables which can impact the continued availability of your articles on the internet. Unfortunately, changing your display name is only 'half of the equation'. Your membername, yvettef, will still be indexed on the internet and associated with everything you publish.

Also, the articles published by Laptop Guy also reference you by name. Therefore, these articles will also appear in a search. You can delete them, but it can take a very long time before they will no longer appear in search results on the internet. In some cases, they may never disappear depending upon how your articles have been used by services outside of Gather.

I would advise you to think about your goals for your writing. With whom do you wish to share your articles? If you want to limit access to Gather members, but restrict access from outside of Gather, then I would suggest adding a 'mature content' flag to all of your articles. You can also publish exclusively to a private or content-restricted group. However, each of these options will reduce the availability of your content within certain segments of the community.

Thus, there are trade-offs with almost every approach. You can also create another membername, use this new pen name for publishing, or request a membername change from Gather. It may be difficult to obtain the latter, but I believe Gather has accommodated a member or two in special circumstances.

There are more methods than this, but perhaps this will give you enough to work with... (?)

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Want to skip over pages in article listings? - THIS will show you how.

Hi Kevin,
This is good to know.... I guess I should stop publishing my "book" on gather. Or at least make it a lot less embarrassing! ;-) Interestingly, I don't mind people I don't know reading what I write, but I'm not that comfortable with people I DO know reading stuff out of context. (Some of it is fiction!) Too bad you can't restrict access to "anyone that doesn't know me in real life"! ;-)

Thanks, again,
Yvette

I am very new and admittedly don't understand how everything works. How do I add my favorite tags? I thought I had added some, but it still shows that I don't have any favorite tags.

Amy,

Your 'Popular Tags' become populated as you publish content on Gather. Therefore, they are a reflection of the tags you use to define your own content. Unfortunately, Gather no longer uses 'Favorite Tags', which reflects those tags you use most often to search for content in the community.

I hope they bring this back at some point, as it was an extremely useful feature.

Did that answer your question?

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Questions about Gather? - Ask other members in the Gather Help Forum.

Kevin, I am really happy to see you are going to be publishing daily.


I still wish we could get Gather to give us folders for our Gather mail!


Good luck with this new challenge!

Kevin - I'm trying to make a little table or text box to use as a sidebar in my Soundtracking articles and I'm trying to figure out the HTML for it.

I did some experimenting today with the div tag, but it isn't working out quite the way I planned it. Do I need to use a table? How would I best accomplish this?

Thanks,
L

how do you post pics with comments or article

Laura,

I'll comment on your 'experiment' article, and leave a few 'tips' for you there!

Ravi,

The steps for adding images to comments can be quite different than the process you must follow for articles (unless you are familiar with HTML).

I'll start off with a simple technique for adding images to comments, and if you need something else, please let me know....

--------------------------

For finding and storing images online, I suggest using an image hosting service like Photobucket.com. There are MANY sites that provide free graphics, but Photobucket has a fairly good selection, and it is very easy to use.

As an example:

1) Go to THIS page on Photobucket. You will see an animated smiley graphic.

2) To add this smiley to a comment, click anywhere in the box under the words 'HTML Tag - Websites & Blogs'.

3) The 'code' for this graphic will be automatically copied to your clipboard.

4) Go to the article or comment box where you want to add the graphic, and click 'paste'.

5) The 'code' for the graphic will be pasted into the comment. When you post the comment, the graphic will then appear.

Note: You must also enter at least one text character into the comment box, along with the image 'code'. This can be just a single period '.', or any message you would like. Images will not be posted unless it is accompanied by text.

This image 'code' will also work in Gather Mail messages.

I hope that's clear!

Thanks, Kevin for the answer to my group mail above, nobody shows when I send one, it says ALL and I'm assuming that means that all those names in the group won't be showing?

Marilyn,

When you send a group mail message, the recipients (group members) are not displayed. Instead, you will only see the name of the group in the To: field.

However, be certain that you do not add any other recipients onto your message (in the CC: or BCC: fields), as this will cause ALL group members to be displayed...potentially leading to a very long list of recipients.

Does that answer your question?

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Dial-up user? - Learn to speed up your Gather experience HERE.

hi kevin not new but i have a question you know the icons for messages and to
join groups my join groups is constantly on and says 3groups to join i go into it and there is nothing there how do i get it to registers only with invites thanks andrew

Andrew,

This is a common problem and is usually caused by your 'Guarded Viewing' filter. I would suggest turning off 'Guarded Viewing' on your 'settings' page (if you have it turned on), and then try accessing the group invitations again.

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Inbox flooded with Gather email? - Control the madness HERE.

Thank you for all your help and advice, Kevin!

Yay! Thank you for the tip about "Guarded Viewing"! I did have it turned off, but I had only some of the boxes checked (for "yes, you can show me that"). I tried checking *all* the boxes, and the mysterious invisible group invitation haunting me for the last three weeks finally showed up. :)

thankyou kevin problem solvered

Hi Kevin!

Could you please tell me if there is a way to delete names in the dropdown menu in the sign-in field on Gather? I had some blonde moments and erroneously typed in spaces or even wrong letters as I logged on and now I have all those errors as a permanent part of my menu... How do I remove them, please?

Duckie,

This information is actually stored by your browser, and can be turned off or deleted by visiting your browser's settings or options menu (look under forms and history).

If you can't locate it, let me know what browser you have and I can let you know how to reset it.

Kevin;



I've been deleting history, cookies and temporary files but it never cleared that menu from my Gather pages. I nosed around and found that on Vista, this new Windows system that I have on my new laptop, it is hiding under TOOLS/ Delete Browsing History/ Form Data--- Delete Forms.

Sigh. It always takes me a while to find my way, but I get there!

:-)

Thanks, Kevin!!!

please help me leave this. I keep getting e-mails. I do not want to be contacted anymore. How do I stop Gather?

Ken,

You may turn off all emails by visiting your personal settings page, which is located under 'settings' in the upper right-hand corner of any page on Gather.

To remove your account entirely, you must send an email requesting account deletion to support@gather.com. Be certain to include your membername kenmart in the email.

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Sort and search your Gather Mail! - Learn how HERE.

Renda,

Unfortunately, exclusion tools (for member/activity blocking) are very limited on Gather. The only security features that I am aware of involve group security, or your own personal settings. I have written a recent article on the security of groups and group content if you are interested.

If there is something specific you would like to achieve, send me a mail message as I may have a work-around solution!

Good Information here Kevin, Thanks : )

Kevin. Thanks for all your answers. You are a very informative person and I can't believe that Gather doesn't pay you for helping others use their site.

Kevin;

You promised a new HTML tip regarding Strikethroughs. I can't seem to find it on this article. Is it somewhere else? I'd love to learn how to do that!

Thanks!

I have created 2 new groups and added banners - I have been told that the banners show - but I can not see them.

But I can see banners on some groups.

Rosemarie

You have already answered a few of my questions reading your comments! Thanks!