Announcements

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Buy a Katabatak print and sponsor Hypography. :autumnleaves:Fall:autumnleaves: Hypography Benefit :painting: Art Sale :painting: http://hypography.com/forums/members/turtle-albums-kitchen-drawer-picture967-hypographyprintscan02scaled.jpg Hypography Limited Edition Print $33 :hal_jackolantern: Sale ends Halloween at Midnight :hal_jackolantern: :bounce:BONUS :bounce: Free Basic Subscription with print purchase $10 Value 11" x 17" inkjet print on 32lb paper, numbered & signed. All proceeds go to support Hypography operations. Contact C1ay by PM to place your order.

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All Hypography members can now create their own blog! When you are logged in, follow this url to set it up. http://hypography.com/forums/blog_usercp.php You can revise your options in the UserCP. A summary of all blogs can be found here: Science Forums - Blogs Who will go first? :)

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During the next five days, ie Easter Weekend, there will be a lot of work on the forums and some major changes to our website. No information will be revealed at this time, but the changes will be good. We will offer new features outside of the forum itself, but which lets forum users do more than they can today here at Hypography. Some of these things have been promised for...let's see..years now. If you get errors or find that the site is inaccessible during this time, don't despair. It will come back. ;) Let the wild speculations begin. :)

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After a fabulous stint as a Junior Moderator and proving his mettle, Freeztar has been promoted by the "Hypography Powers That Be" (a.k.a. The Usual Gang of Idiots) to the most exalted position of full Moderator. Please join us in giving your sympathies congratulating him on his new bondage role! :cheer: Yonder is a most reverend gentleman, who, belike having received wrong by some person, is at most odds with his own gravity and patience that ever you saw, :phones: Buffy

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Our server is located in the city of Walla Walla, Washington, and they had a major storm on Friday, taking out power lines etc. Hypography was down for at least 7-8 hours. | Top Stories | KREM.com | News for Spokane, Washington Now don't ask me why they would keep 911 open but not Hypo!!! :hihi:

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I'm pleased to announce the latest addition to our Moderator team, the illustrious Freeztar who has impressed the socks off of just about everyone here in the last year (he's actually been lurking about for much longer, but we all know what an incredible contribution he's made recently) has been made our latest Junior Moderator...Welcome Freezy! I'm also pleased to announce that CraigD--by virtue of his incredible talent in both science and the diplomacy of moderation--has been promoted to Senior Moderator: he's been invaluable in making this one of the more pleasant places to discuss science on the Internet, and we're all sure glad we have him! Please join me in a cacophony of congratulations to both of them! :cheer: w007! Way to go guys!:cheer: Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom, :phones: Buffy

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Today's stats show: Threads: 12,336, Posts: 190,617, Members: 7,052, Active Members: 1,199 We're seeing a lot of visitors lately, so lurkers: Join today! We're only 10K posts from our second 100K (anyone remember the initial 10K challenge way back!!!). I'm not asking people to start hit-and-run posting but we are definitely getting somewhere. :) After reaching 200K we need to start aiming for that Big Million...anyone think we can pull that off in, say, three years from now?

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Our Hv2 project is located here: http://hypography.com/forums/project.php?projectid=1

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The forums have been upgraded again. Please allow for some time before everything works as normal. Some functionality has been switched off while we upgrade the different sections. Please post bugs in this thread. Note: Paying sponsors are seeing advertisements. I am trying to figure out why this is happening.

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The forums have been upgraded to the newest version. If you experience any problems with the bulletin board software, or any of its features, please post a detailed report here (detailed as in the steps that led up to the error, a summary of the error messages seen, and if you can repeat the error). The Hypography Development staff will look into the errors as soon as possible. The forum will be down for approximately 3 hours starting Sunday, July 15 at 18:00 (GMT) as we upgrade the forum software. If you experience any problems with features of the forums after the upgrade is done, please post a message in this thread and the staff will fix it as soon as possible.

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We now support tags (keywords) for posts and threads. This will help people get an impression of what the current and most discussed topics at Hypography are. In order for this system to work well, it is important that you tag your posts. A minimum of one tag is *required* in order to post a new thread - it is not required for single posts. It would be nice if everyone helped out by adding tags to threads - the tag list for threads is displayed below the thread. :)

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I just sent out a Hypo newsletter and managed to label it "April 2006". For those of you who are not calendar-challenged, it really is from April 2007. :hihi:

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Attention: Due to the wonderful posts and great contributions in the Terra Preta thread, the staff at Hypography have decided to create a sub-forum specific to TP in the Earth Sciences primary forum. Our hope is that users will benefit from the data contained in this thread by splitting some of the topics into their own threads. Please help us to fertilize this new seed with your ideas, allowing Terra Preta to branch into the beautiful tree it deserves to be! The ground's the limit! (A little TP humor there :hihi: ). To do this correctly, we must close the parent thread. All of the data will still be available, and any links that have been shared outside of Hypography will automatically redirect to the new subforum. We hope that, as you create new subtopics (such as making charcoal, the chemistry of TP, personal experiences, and the like) you will include direct links to posts in the parent thread for reference, and even quote them. We want this rich field of data available and accessible to all who may have even the slightest interest, and appreciate your efforts in helping with this. It's your efforts that have motivated us to make this decision. Thank you all for sharing your knowledge and ideas with those around you. We are proud that you've done so on Hypography. :) Link to the new sub-forum: http://hypography.com/forums/terra-preta.html

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Starting at 06:00 GMT, there may be downtimes due to server maintenance. If anyone experiences these in certain features that last for more than 2 hours, please post a message here with detailed information.

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Due to problems with spammers sending private messages, we have turned off the ability to send more than 1 such message until you reach User Level 1, which happens automatically when you reach 10 posts. We apologize for any inconvenience to our new members, but spam is a problem and we need to do everything we can to fight it. Details on our user levels can be found here: http://hypography.com/forums/tutorials-how-tos/2278-understanding-user-levels.html

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I wanted to spend this - my 10,000th post - on some thoughts I want to share with all of you. When Hypography started out back in 1999 (before it was even launched), the idea was to create a portal with links to interesting science sites. The name "hypography" came to me in a flash on my way to work one day, and as some of you probably know by now, the term is "a combination of hyperlink and bibliography: a list of references to electronic documents". I figured this word could have the same sort of function as "bibliography" (books and articles) and "discography" (list of musical albums/recordings). An example of a use of a "hypography" would then be a list of links, usually in relation to an article, image or something shich the links would explain. My own attempts at creating hypographies are found at Hypographies - science and technology topics and are more or less outdated now, but at least I attempted to see the idea through. But life wanted other things. My first daughter was born the same year Hypography.com was launched (2000), and put severe restrictions on my free time. In 2002 I launched the Hypography forums, and after my second daughter was born in 2003 (the same year I began in my current position as web editor for the Norwegian Space Centre) my time became a luxury commodity. It is strange how things endure, though. From being just an idea that popped up, the two sites have grown into a massive conglomeration of content. We have 150,000 posts, a few thousand articles, some book reviews, 50+ quizzes, 50 hypographies, tons of reviewed links - and it is growing every day. Most importantly, though, we have a large number of active members. It is thanks to your contributions that this site has survived through 7 years. The fantastic dedication many of you show for our site, and the obvious passion many of you have for science, learning, and (not least) sharing, is simply stunning. We have become an international community with members from just about every contintent (I am not sure about Antarctica, although I remember one member who used it as his location). You are the life and blood of Hypography. Some of our members have been singled out and whipped into submission. We call them moderators or administrators. I don't want to mention names (none mentioned, none forgotten) but I would like to say that I am not only humbled by the amount of work all of you put into Hypography, but also the enthusiasm you show and the willingness to think forward and discuss ideas. Our entire site is growing into some sort of cyber-brotherhood that I never in my wildest dream imagined possible. No, we are not the largest forum on Earth, nor can we claim superiority in any specific area, but I have a distinct feeling that we are going somewhere. At this point we are moving forward with a large project that is being drawn up. We will need help from many of you (and probably your friends, too). It is time to learn from lessons past, and study how others have progressed, and find a clear path for our community. Excuse me for waxing lyrical here for a moment, but I dream of a future for Hypography where we can escape the confines that the forum structure places on any site, and blossom into something larger and more productive. I want the place to grow into a community where people come to learn, to expand their knowledge, and most of all to share that knowledge with others. Hypography has always been intended as a place for people to find interesting things and learn something new. A lot of brilliant suggestions have come from fellow members, ranging from ideas about forum structure to enhanced search capabilities, entirely new "business models", and creative visions for user interaction. I am reading all of it, and I am working hard to find out exactly what steps we need to take to transmogrify what is today a good community into something that will be a great community. It is also important to find out not only what makes a good community great, but also what makes it last. If we adopt every hyped technology out there, we will probably succeed in the short term. But we have lasted 7 years already. How can we make sure we last 70? Is it even possible? Do we care? Maybe not. But I personally care enough about the concepts of learning, of sharing, and of having fun with expanding my horizons, to admit I am passionate about it. And I want to make sure Hypography becomes a great place to be. To succeed, I will need all the help I can get, and believe me when I say that I appreciate every single piece of input I receive. Sometimes I get kicked in the butt for being "arrogant" or "closed-minded" (or both). It hurts, but sometimes it is true. I am an arrogant and close-minded son of a bitch sometimes. But not all the time. And I think that is true for a lot of people here, a lot of people who share the wonderful trait that is "passion". We're like small children at times - we run around and hit all the edges and hard corners, we get bruised and beat up, but for some reason we keep running around and we do it with pleasure. It's the price of being a passionate human! So, dear friends, I hope 2007 will be a great year for our wonderful community. I want to say a thorough thank you to everyone who is contributing - in any way - to Hypography. You are important people to me, and rest assured that you are important to a lot of other people, as well.

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Greetings all! The chat is on! You can reach the chat by one of three methods. There is a link called "Chat" at the top of the forum pages. You can also go to the forum front and click on the FlashChat icon near the bottom. Or you can use this handy link right here: http://hypography.com/forums/chat/flashchat.php For those unfamiliar with it, we are currently discussing Hypography v2 in a special channel. Once you have entered, you will see this channel on the right side of the screen. You can join by using an IRC like command "/join Hypo2 discussion", or use the box near the top of the chat. I would like to propose a live chat to everyone for the date of January 14th, 2007. I, the server administrator and grumpy hermit, will surface for the day to discuss among other things, Hypography and it's future. As some may know or figured, we are planning a large scale update to the entire site. For close to a month some of you have given your thoughts and opinions about different features you would like to see. Which the staff and I appreciate with no small amount of gratitude. From these ideas, after this Sunday, we plan to move forward with development. This could be your last chance to squeak in a suggestion until after the update (which could be months away!!). If you have no suggestions for Hypography, then drop by to meet your fellow pursuers of knowledge! Not like I would miss the chance to meet some of you, and talk about something other then work for an hour or two. :hihi: Just for a little more information, I will most likely join the chat around 11 am (GMT-6), and stay well into the evening. No need for an invite, or to confirm your attendance here. Show up whenever you like. Even if that means well before my arrival. :please: P, p, p, pwease don't leave me hanging. ;)

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It's that time of year...and the Christmas Quiz Competition is back. All you have to do is get all the questions correct in our Christmas Quiz and you could win yourself a fabulous Hypography coffee mug. :)

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We have two new senior moderators! Qfwfq and Chacmool have been bumped up the ladder to Senior Moderators. While this may sound like something we honor old people with :hihi: , it is better to explain it as a "moderator plus" position. The "Senior moderator" status is awarded to those moderators who have been on our team the longest as a token of gratitude. Thanks for your stellar efforts, Q and Chac! :D

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Buffy has joined the administrator team. Thanks for your excellent contributions to Hypography! You are an insightful and extremely skilled person and it's an honor to have you on the team. :xparty: :woohoo: