IMC UK Help Page
If you can't find the information you need here yet, try Indymedia Chat where you will find plenty of Indymedia volunteers online at most times of day who can help with any questions you have about Indymedia UK.
For technical questions, error messages etc:
email tech AT lists.indymedia.org.uk (replace AT with @) | IMC UK Tech list info
(This help page is being reorganised & added to - apologies while it is messy)
Help with:
Publishing your news article
An overview of the publish process & explanations of the pre-publish page and the publish form: read on
Uploading files with FTP
For large files (e.g. audio & video) it is best to upload them by FTP instead of via the publish page read on
Searching Indymedia UK
Indymedia UK uses Google scraper Scroogle for its search. Why not Google? read on
Security
Why is my browser asking me to accept a security certificate? Why is a secure connection a good way to read Indymedia? read on
Below are the remaining parts of the existing help page, which will soon be tidied up & made clearer
Viewing Indymedia
As you have found your way here, you can most probably browse the site. But are fonts wrong size for you. Try using a different browser such as Firefox, you can set the size of some of the fonts within it.
Accessing media files
You may already have software to access media. But if you use MS Windows then audio files can be listened to with FooBar2000 or MusikCube and video files viewed with VLC Player or Helix Player.
Images:
Photos should in a compressed format such as jpeg and should be less than 200k file size. The width to be viewable easily on everyone's screen choosing width to suit. While using an image editor to resize you may wish to add text to image itself such as a url as images can often be detached from captions.
Logos and line drawings as images with only a few colours can be in lossless format such as gif or png to give better quality than jpeg.
Other Media:
Note you must fill in some text content as well as media upload. The publish form does not accept blank entries. You should state what may be required to view the media etc. Don't forget that you still need to provide all the basic info required for any article: who, what, when, where, why.
To distribute large video files then use http://video.indymedia.org.
Options
You will be given some options:
Region this is optional. All postings appear automatically on the UK frontpage newswire. There is a maximum of 2 regions one can tick. If you tick a region, your article will also appear in the local page you choose. Do no repost article to get it on all regional pages, as this is very likely to lead to all your postings being hidden as reposts. Note the local pages are linked to local collectives that manage them. If want to set up a local collective see contact page, join email lists, help out and engage.
Topic this is optional too but please do take the time to correctly categorize. All postings appear automatically on the UK frontpage newswire. If you tick one or two topics, for instance 'ecology' and 'anti-militarism', your article will in addition appear in the pages dedicated to 'ecology' and 'anti-militarism'. People who only want to read articles on these issues will see it. There is a maximum number of 3 topics that you can choose.
Do not abuse (spam) the selections; this may lead to article being completely hidden
Delays
Reports can take time before they are copied to all the mirror sites that we utilise. Large media files will always take a long time to appear. There are also occasional much longer delays during site maintenance updates which usually take place at night but occasionally are still running the following day. Some pages such as topic pages take much longer than front page to update. Please do not repost..
Copy right
All contributions are considered availiable for re-use without seeking permission from author as long as those that re-use them allow further free re-use of the derivative work. This is know as copyleft. In future for clarity we may add a facility with which you can specify the terms of publication from a range of off-the-shelf licenses. You can of course specify this in a post now, perhaps by stating that your work is contributed to the public domain or by using specific licenses from http://creativecommons.org/license/ and http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
( a link to that url should do rather than copying whole license ).
We will later add more to this help page, do get in touch if you have suggestions. You may wish to look at our documentation project.
General feedback can be email to us at: imc-uk users list (note your email will be put in a public archive, see contact page )
If you find any bugs please mail to the tech list (with details to help us track them down) - thanks! (note your email will be put in a public archive, see contact page)
Please also send suggestions for improvements to this help file to relevant list.
Also see the first welcome message
IMC UK, 25.06.2003 23:55
