Third Party Article and Photo Posting Guidelines

Third Party Article and Photo Posting Guidelines

Articles

When posting third-party articles in the Wonderful Waterloo forums (newspaper, magazine, etc.) please post only the first four paragraphs of the article or the information that you have deemed important separated by a series of ellipses (...) to a maximum of 25% of the article.

Also, when posting, please provide the following things on a above the article (which should appear in a quote box):

Headline title (bold, size 4, blue)
Below the headline on a single line: Publication date | Author name | Publication | A link to the article.

An article should look like this:

Becoming Santa: Maintaining the myth a goal of modern mall display
December 23, 2010 | BOB VRBANAC | WATERLOO CHRONICLE | LINK

It isn’t cheap being one of Santa’s helpers and extending the global reach of the jolly old elf.

Never mind the suit, there’s also the trappings that come with the office. If you’re going to be a proxy for the world’s greatest wish granter you better provide the appropriate whimiscial environment for that type of magic to happen.

That’s the lesson learned at Waterloo’s Conestoga Mall. A major renovation at the mall last year also lead to a major rethink about the mall Santa and how to make sure that kids got enough face time with the guy in the red suit.

But the building of that buzz didn’t come cheap. To redecorate the whole mall, in addition to sprucing up Santa, cost a cool quarter of million dollars...

Or like this

Becoming Santa: Maintaining the myth a goal of modern mall display
December 23, 2010 | BOB VRBANAC | WATERLOO CHRONICLE | LINK

That’s the lesson learned at Waterloo’s Conestoga Mall. A major renovation at the mall last year also lead to a major rethink about the mall Santa and how to make sure that kids got enough face time with the guy in the red suit.
...
But the building of that buzz didn’t come cheap. To redecorate the whole mall, in addition to sprucing up Santa, cost a cool quarter of million dollars.
...
Instead of doling out the cash for a photo with old Saint Nick, the mall generously e-mails a photo of the moment caught in time and extends best wishes for the season.

Photos

When posting photographs in the Wonderful Waterloo forums, it is important to credit them properly. Improperly credited photo postings will be deleted by the moderation staff.

When posting photos/images, directly above or below the photo list the photographer's name (if available), and if it is from a third party source, provide the source and/or a link to the source. To avoid broken image links, please upload the images to a personal image account (photobucket, etc.) and link to it from there.

Merely citing Google, Flickr, Wikipedia or some other host or search engine is not sufficient for your photo post to qualify. If you don't have the required information about a photograph, then don't post it.

For example:

Source: Levitt Goodman Architects - Link

IEFBR14 · 01-04-2011 12:19 PM

Here's some help for those who may be struggling to conform with our overlords' new Third Party Article and Photo Posting Guidelines.

I developed the following for use with Google's Chrome web browser. If you use Firefox or Safari you're on your own. If you use Internet Exploder you have my sympathies.

Install the Create Link Chrome extension. This is useful for easily adding links on other forums using HTML, BBCode, etc. More importantly here, it's also customizable. Once you have Create Link installed and working using standard formats, add the following BBCode as a new format:

<B><SIZE="4"><COLOR="blue">%text%</COLOR></SIZE></B> %newline% DATE | AUTHOR | PUBLICATION | <URL=%url%>Link</URL> <QUOTE>QUOTE</QUOTE>

I chose to name my special format WWCode for obvious reasons. Note that in the above I've changed the [ and ] to < and > for illustrative purposes only. Otherwise the forum software would have recognized them as BBCode and translated them to what you see below. You'll need to use real square brackets when you create your special format. Anyway here's what you'll see if you do a preview using real [ and ]:

%text% %newline% DATE | AUTHOR | PUBLICATION | Link

QUOTE

Note that you'll still need to fill in the date, author, publication and quote stuff manually. There's nothing I can do to help with that without rewriting the extension. (Good luck with that

) But at least the URL and headline gets set up automagically and the overall format gets set up to conform with the new rules.

Anyway, once you do that you'll get something like this:

Kitchener man charged in crash that killed cyclist
Tue Jan 04 2011 | Record staff | The Record | Link

A 24-year-old Kitchener man has been charged with careless driving in connection with a September crash that left a cyclist dead...

On Dec. 28, police charged Matthew Waltenberry of Kitchener in connection with the crash. In addition to careless driving, Waltenberry is also charged with driving while suspended and obtaining a license under an assumed name.

Enjoy!

markster · 04-15-2011 09:18 AM

Administrators,
Would it be possible for you to create some custom BBCode to help streamline this process? I'm not familiar with vBulletin, but I know it's possible in phpBB.

Something of a format similar to this would be awesome:

[newsquote=head,date,auth,pub,url]quoted text[/newsquote]

UrbanWaterloo · 04-19-2011 07:15 AM

News Quote BB Code

Make sure to use all 5 options, 4 line-breaks ( | ), or it won't display. If you don't know an option just use a symbol, like a period or underscore.
Make sure to use the full http:// url for it to link properly.

icon

format

[newsquote="Title | Date | Author | Publication | Full URL"]quoted text[/newsquote]

example

[newsquote="Becoming Santa: Maintaining the myth a goal of modern mall display | December 23, 2010 | BOB VRBANAC | WATERLOO CHRONICLE | http://www.waterloochronicle.ca/news/article/226480"]That’s the lesson learned at Waterloo’s Conestoga Mall. A major renovation at the mall last year also lead to a major rethink about the mall Santa and how to make sure that kids got enough face time with the guy in the red suit.
...
But the building of that buzz didn’t come cheap. To redecorate the whole mall, in addition to sprucing up Santa, cost a cool quarter of million dollars.
...
Instead of doling out the cash for a photo with old Saint Nick, the mall generously e-mails a photo of the moment caught in time and extends best wishes for the season.[/newsquote]

translates into

Becoming Santa: Maintaining the myth a goal of modern mall display

December 23, 2010 | BOB VRBANAC | WATERLOO CHRONICLE | Link

That’s the lesson learned at Waterloo’s Conestoga Mall. A major renovation at the mall last year also lead to a major rethink about the mall Santa and how to make sure that kids got enough face time with the guy in the red suit.
...
But the building of that buzz didn’t come cheap. To redecorate the whole mall, in addition to sprucing up Santa, cost a cool quarter of million dollars.
...
Instead of doling out the cash for a photo with old Saint Nick, the mall generously e-mails a photo of the moment caught in time and extends best wishes for the season.

mpd618 · 04-19-2011 12:42 PM

Neat! I might actually use this for once.

IEFBR14 · 04-19-2011 03:51 PM

Would it be possible to prefill the option box with a template so that people don't have to remember the syntax, e.g. like so:

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