The real FAQs?

These are only light FAQs, the full and complete system FAQs have lots more to offer.

Am I restricted to a few pages?

No. This is not a four page wonder. You can have as many pages and images as you like.

What are 'blogs?

Short for weblogs, they are online diaries, filled with comments and links. The first website was a weblog by Tim Berners-Lee in Jan 1992. They're popular, because they're easy, ours is also powerful. This is a good overview.

What if I want a private, intranet site?

Create a site, then make it private. Go to the menu Editors only: ==> Prefs ==> Editorial ==> Site access. You can then invite other editors in. Once they're logged in they'll be able to use the site normally. You may want to think about security after they've logged in, by setting their cookies to expire at the end of each session, they'll be forced to log in each time, thus, other users of a shared computer will not gain access—though you should warn your editors, that they need to close down the browser for this to work. Or, that they must log out.

How many sites can I have?

Unlimited! We would suggest that for schools each class or year has one. Perhaps each teacher may want one for personal use or for school use. Each subject, each sport activity, the school governors too, the parents teacher association, fund raising... The list is endless. Or for businesses. Of course you could do all these activities within just one site and initially that's certainly the easiest route. A member posts a message, which is upgraded to a story and put into the site structure. They then can edit that page, as they own it (as can editors), this way a page can be kept moving. However, once people see the ease and power, they invariably want one too ;-)

New sites spawned through your top level site can be addressed as either http://www.newsite.mysite.spiderlines.com or http://www.mysite.spiderlines.com/newsite or http://www.newsite.mysite.com or http://www.mysite.com/newsite. You'll need to decide on this from the outset. Each site is totally self enclosed with their own membership and editors—though we can mix that in with others if you wish. This way your members will be members of all (or many) sites, likewise you a member of one site can be an editor of another.

Can I store my site elsewhere?

You own your site. There's no lock in here! If you decide, for whatever reason that you want to move to another provider, you can simply download your site, at anytime, and move it. We want to keep you here due to our services and service not because you've nowhere else to go. Your site will be something like http://www.spiderlines.com/mysite. If you want it under your own domain name http://www.mysite.org or the more official http://www.mySchool.localeducationauthority.sch.uk this can be set that up for you. If ever you move, we can ensure there is never any link rot.

What's the history/pedigree?

Frontier (the object orientated database engine) has been around since 1990 when it was a competitor for AppleScript on the Macintosh. In 1997 it was used for static site building and automation. At the end of 1999 brought Manila. For the last few years we've been building communities and developing both internet and intranet sites for public and private customers.

Support? I'm a complete and utter novice.

All power to you. Go for it, it may look hard, but it isn't. We've seen people who couldn't work a mouse, within a few seconds—yes, seconds—click and publish. All we ask is that you at least can type, if only with two fingers. Just take it one day at a time. By the end of the week not only will you be blogging with the best of them, uploading pictures and adding them to your pages, creating new stories, and... Well, what else would you like to do? Delete messages, ban members, create news panels, email straight into your blog, include messages within messages or create your own themes? There's a friendly newbies' mailing list as well as a downloadable pdf (3.5megs) which has many of the howtos. You can use this as a training manual.

If you get any problems, just email us, and we'll help you out.

Mentoring and monitoring?

We'll be looking over your shoulder, virtually. Every message you upload, we'll be emailed it, that's every comment, picture, story—everything. This way we can make sure nothing inappropriate is posted, and we can see if you need any help. Maybe we could point you to further resources, help find your blogging voice, delete comment spam, give you a heads up is something could be written better. We know it'll feel more comfortable for you when you have a someone looking after you.

What could go wrong?

Bugs! With every complex piece of software, something weird can happen. Mostly, we're auto informed if a macro error happens and usually have everything running sweet, but from time to time particularly when we're adding new stuff, weirdness can happen. Tell us and we'll fix it.

Comment spammers or posting of offensive material. It's a big bad world and we try to protect you and yours from it. We do our best but cannot catch everything. Within your site is a notification list, so that everything that's posted is emailed to a list of people. See something that shouldn't be there, go to the site and delete it. We'll be doing the same, but obviously, we may miss marginal calls, the obvious we'll delete as soon as we see it.

Referral spam is the bane of our lives at the moment, this is why we've hidden the referral page away from the public, only editors can get there. A referral is when someone links to your site and then travels that link to your site. It's particularly useful in finding how traffic get to your site, and for seeing what search terms were used in search engines, like Google. However, spammers live here too, they want search engines to find links to their sites on your site, so that the search engines think they must be popular, therefore good, therefore show them higher in search results! So, robot referal spammers hit sites pretending to be ordinary people linking through ordinary links. Many of these sites are porn, gambling and other nefarious 'non-work-safe' sites. So, only editors can see their sites referal page, and they should be made aware of this issue.

Stalkers and banned members repeatedly rejoining. There are crazy people out there, but thankfully very, very few. We keep records of IP addresses of all postings, and as such it is possible to trace these types of people. We suggest that should you be worried by this very, very rare phenomenon you contact the police. Posting to the internet these days is not an anonymous activity. We have found that once posters know of this they're as good as gold. So far, we've only ever had one problem, communities are good at policing themselves, handled with a straight bat the issue will resolve itself.