Welcome to Negative World. If you have any question, please read the following list and click to read an answer. If your question isn't in the list or if you have a suggestion, feel free to post a reply.

To be able to add more questions/answers to the list later, your participations to this thread will eventually be deleted to make room, after they've been answered.

Donations

Currently, the site doesn't bring in much money, and it costs about $85 a year to keep up. Not a whole lot, but the owner of this site isn't particularly rich, so every bit helps. Also, the web designer spent a lot of time and work to implement skins, navigation layout, make the site work quick and neat, and implement the options you asked him, all this instead of doing a paid professional site. The more you support the site, the better it'll run and the more potential its future will have.

Now, the FAQ...

General questions

What is "Negative World"?
What are the round icons at the corners of the site?
What are XP and user levels? Why do some features seem inaccessible to me?
Can I choose the looks and features of the site?
How does the private message system work?
Does the site have social network connections?
What is the Neverending Experience Quest?

Forum

Are there specific threads I should know about?
What do the lights on the left of the forum index mean?
What are the negative numbers on the right of the forum index? On the private message page? Level 99?
What are the little grey icons on the right of the main forum page? What are "news", "roundtables", etc.?
How can I search for specific posts?
Can you flag threads to spot them more easily?
Can I embed videos, resize an image? What's "Reference"? My links don't work, etc.?
What are the Terms Of Service?
Apart from the T.O.S. is there particular netiquette to observe with post formatting?

Game Database

How do you rate games? The games I want to rate aren't in the base? How do I write reviews?
Do you have a backlog feature? Can I see who is playing what?
How can I browse Negative World's game reviews?

User profiles

What are user profile features? Can I see who's online?
How can I browse user profiles/post history? I'm looking for a specific profile?
How can I check the system codes of other Negative World users (Wii, XBL, PSN, Steam...)?
My Steam system code on my Negative World profile doesn't link to my Steam profile!

Can you flag threads to spot them more easily?

Yes.

To flag/unflag a thread, just click on the grey icon on its right. It'll then turn black (if it's a standard thread, a little flag will appear on it), and the thread will be marked as "flagged" in its title. Contrarywise, if you click on the icon of a flagged thread, it'll unflag it.

Of course, flags are kept between sessions. They'll still be here if you log off then log back in.

To easily find them, you can filter the board to display only flagged threads by using the search form.

Back to the top

How can I search for specific posts?

There are two ways to search for posts.

If you're looking for a specific thread, you can use the Search form at the top of the forum.

The Type field filters threads by type, the level field filters threads by level. You can type part of a user name in the Author field, and the results will display threads from the user it found. The Keywords field works a bit like Google: it will look for threads where the words you typed as keywords were used in the original post. For example, if you type:

Mario Luigi

... it will look for threads with Mario and Luigi in the OP, but not necessarily like this, it'll find "Mario & Luigi", "Mario and Luigi", "I like Luigi better than Mario", etc. and will underline both words.

Like in Google, if you want to search for a specific expression, you can use quotes. If you search for:

"Mario and Luigi"

... it'll ignore anything else, like "Mario & Luigi". Of course, you can combine keywords, for example, if you want to find a thread comparing the "Mario & Luigi" series with the "Paper Mario" series it's best to type:

"Paper Mario" Mario Luigi

... because it'll look for exactly "Paper Mario", and then various combinations where Mario and Luigi are used.

The other way to search for posts is the Reply Search, which you can find under the Forum tab. That functionality lists replies, not threads. It uses the same filters as the forum Search function, the keywords work the exact same.

Back to the top

How can I browse Negative World's game reviews?

You can access reviews from a specific author from his/her profile, and reviews of a specific game from its game page, but if you want to make a broader search, you can use three different methods:

- Through the board search: open up the search form (question mark at the top right of the main board page), and select "review" as type. You can also filter them by author or thread name (not game name).

- Through the game database: on the base page, select "reviewed" under the "Reviewed" field, and the list will display only games with reviews. You can also add various filters. To access the reviews, first get to the game pages.

- Through the front page: it's probably the quickest way. First filter the articles with reviews only, then you can use game name and/or system filters, and the review titles and links will be displayed with their introduction paragraph.

Back to the top

Anyway you could make it so I can take skins out of my daily rotation? I really hate this Wario Land skin, but I like all the rest.

When embedding videos, is there an option to re-size the video? Like make them smaller? I've seen the feature on youtube videos.

I think we could all benefit if the posting form window were expanded a bit! As it is now, I find it a bit too small and find myself constantly scrolling up/ down to edit portions of text, even for posts that aren't necessarily that long to begin with.

Could we expand the posting form area a bit?

@roykoopa64

1- Place your pointer over the lower-right corner of the posting form.
2- Click and hold down the mouse button.
3- Drag down.
4- Release mouse button.
5- Send cheque to Guillaume.

edit

Step 0 - Use Firefox 4.0.1.

@Guillaume That's awesome man, the new Firefox rocks!

The thread status lights haven't been working for me lately. Threads that I know I haven't read are yellow.

For good or bad, the reply system kind of reminds me of Twitter, what with the @replies. But I was wondering, similar to the PM, is it possible we could get notifications when someone replies directly to our posts? I'm sure it's happened in other threads where I completely forgot about them and someone did reply to me.

Maybe I'm an idiot but I really don't get the video embed thing at all now.

@carlosrox

I only do YouTube:

(take out the spaces)

[ video ] youtube = thenumbersthatpertaintotheyoutubevideo [ / video ]


Is there something else you don't get?

VofEscaflowne said:

For good or bad, the reply system kind of reminds me of Twitter, what with the @replies. But I was wondering, similar to the PM, is it possible we could get notifications when someone replies directly to our posts? I'm sure it's happened in other threads where I completely forgot about them and someone did reply to me.

That is a good idea.

That would be very handy, but probably fairly difficult to implement.

Are you talking about email notifications? In theory that's not super difficult to implement, but I'm a bit behind on requests lately and trying to prioritize. (Ok so a stats page wasn't a priority but whatever, I LIKE NUMBERS.)

A little known feature that might help is that on the main forum page, on the right side where there is username, level there is also a button to the left of the username. Yes, that might look like only part of the design (and it originally was), but it's actually a button. It lets you "flag" posts that you want to be able to search for quickly, and then when you go to the search form you can search for "flagged" and find all of the threads that you have flagged. It's a cool option and I had hoped Simba could put it somewhere more obvious but he didn't really have the time to do so. Maybe I'll throw together a little flag icon or something sometime and make it more obvious that it exists.

@Zero

Yeah I know about being able to flag posts... but I guess it's more about tracking direct replies, such as people who add @VofEscaflowne to their posts by clicking "Reference" on a post I made, instead of keeping track of specific threads. The notification would be similar to the PM system but would instead directly link to the reply where your username was mentioned. Once the page of the thread has been loaded up, the notification would disappear.

The thread flagging is useful but only so much as the forum can become quite active and kind of hard to follow on every single thread where I posted sometimes.

Hmm, I see what you mean. That's a bit more complex though, because when you reference someone else's post, it doesn't save it as a unique thing, it just saves it as part of the message. Which would mean that after every message is sent, there would need to be code that parses the messages, finds out if any references exist... then checks the id of the reference to find out who it was, yada yada. Not impossible, but kind of convoluted and would make posting messages take longer.

Why do apostrophes mess up when viewed from other web sites? I hope I can explain this correctly.

I don't know if this is related to Microsoft Word, but when I copy and paste text into the Negative World posting form, everything looks normal and I assume that the text is being copied as pure text only.

However, I have noticed that apostrophes look messed up when viewed from outside websites:



That 'symbol' is caused by these kinds of characters: ‘ ’ “ ”

If I simply type an apostrophe or quotation mark in the NW posting form it looks like: ' ' " "

Is there some kind of incompatibility I'm not aware of???

I copied and pasted a review from Word once and the apostrophes messed up.

One thing ive thought about lately is that the last 3 replied to topics that ive done {that is in my profile} id like to see that on the forum thread browsing page because i keep going to my profile to find a topic or what ever

*copy pasta'd from the wrong thread*