FUD FAQ

Best Practices: what software do we recommend for using Baen's Bar?

Please keep in mind that the following suggestions are just that, suggestions. We do know that all modes of the Bar work well with these programs, so you shouldn't run into many problems using them. Many of these programs are free, so we would encourage you to download and install them if possible. We tried to test as many older programs as possible, but there's no way we can guarantee that the FUD software will work with everything.

Web: Internet Explorer (preferably as up-to-date of a version as possible), Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari variants.

Email: Gmail, Windows Live mail or Hotmail, etc.

NNTP: Mozilla Thunderbird

Alright, I’m setup for posting on the Web forum but I’d like to try e-mail and NNTP posting. How do I get those set up?

rboatright set up some tutorial pages with some self-made content as well as some content from Motiak and mbarker to help you get going with e-mail and NNTP posting. If you’d like to get started with e-mail posting, please go here. If you’d like to get started with NNTP posting, please go here.

I’m set up for NNTP posting but my posts aren’t making it to the Web forum. What am I doing wrong?

There are a few possibilities here. The easiest answer is that you aren’t using the correct name or e-mail when posting via NNTP. There are three different e-mail/name possibilities you can use to get your posts from NNTP to the web:

1. Set your NNTP e-mail to the e-mail linked to your bar account.
2. Set your NNTP name to your web login id.
3. Set your NNTP name to your web alias.

If none of the above seems to fix the problem then FUD may be having issues with your newsreader. We’re trying to be compatible with as many newsreaders as possible but you may wish to try an alternative newsreader like Thunderbird.

I tried making a post using HTML but it has lots of extra whitespace. What happened?

FUD only has two options for forums, HTML or BBCode. We wanted to allow HTML posting but that led to a lot of issues with whitespace on web, NNTP and email posts. So what we did is create a Use HTML button. If you don’t select the Use HTML button then your post will be wrapped in HTML pre tags which keeps all whitespace as if it were plain text. Your post will be processed in HTML regardless of whether or not you hit the Use HTML button but the button will help avoid extra whitespace in things like slush submissions.

I posted in NNTP/sent an e-mail using HTML but it didn’t make it to the Web. What happened?

FUDforum is currently setup to send HTML down to NNTP and Email but It currently cannot receive HTML from those formats. This is something that may change in the future but currently HTML and NNTP HTML messages will not transfer their encoding up to the web.

Some of the imported posts have weird characters in them. What happened?

Unfortunately, not everything can transfer over from Fusetalk in a quick and orderly fashion. Because of this there will be a some artifacts that got malformed in the move (ex: Word fancy quotes) but overall things should look the same.

I used to use the import from Word function on Fusetalk but FUD doesn’t have that, what should I do?

Unfortunately, moving to a better overall product still leads to some feature loss and as such you can’t directly paste from Word to the FUDbar. However, there are ways to still do this. Here are two ways to still post from Word:

1. When you finish typing what you want to post from Word, click File->Save As… and save your Word document as an HTML file. Open the HTML file using a simple program like Notepad and copy and paste the HTML contents into your post. Select the Use HTML button to specify that you’re doing an all-HTML post and click Preview Message. The preview should show what you wish to see. If things look alright then post your message
2. Another option is to use http://word2cleanhtml.com/. We haven’t tested it extensively but if you select the Original HMTL tab after you convert from Word to HTML and copy/paste those contents it should be the same as saving your Word doc as HTML.

I have my account set up but I can’t find some of my more recent posts. Where’d they go?

Your post is there but unfortunately the import process caused threads with 0 replies to get bumped back behind threads with replies. We may do some bumping of threads and we altered the import process for some of the more recent posts but you may need to search for and bump your post.