About This Site

This community is designed to help anyone who has a love of Scotland interact, communicate, and collaborate in creative new ways. You can contribute and browse various types of content to help find the answers and advice you need, and to share your knowledge with others. Unlike traditional sites the Tartanweb Community is maintained completely by it's users - and that will include you!

This community has a few twists that make it interesting, more useful, and help keep it accurate and relevant.

The site is owned and operated by Tartanweb Scotland Ltd whose business has operated on the web for over 20 years. The company has over the years created a number of unique resources and Clanfinder, Tartanfinder, Highland Laddie Tartan Generator etc are all examples which you will find used on many sites. The company has attracted a number of founder members and sponsors who will pay for advertising and that revenue will go back into the site in terms of development . This is a unique site as is purpose is to provide the vehicle for an expanding knowledge base based on its contributors and the best opinions and resources will get to the top through group acceptance.

Esteem

Most important is the concept of esteem, which is a rough indicator of how your fellow community members feel about you. You'll notice that most items throughout this community have a "vote" next to them. By voting an item up, you're raising the esteem of the item's author; by voting an item down, you're saying that the author's community respect should be lowered.

Some activities within our community are restricted to members who have a sufficient level of esteem. If you try to do something and don't have enough esteem, we'll display a message telling you.

You'll earn esteem based on what other people think of your participation. You earn...

+5 when you "accept" an answer to one of your questions
+10 when someone votes one of your items up
+25 if someone "accepts" your answer to their question
+100 if someone chooses to follow you

You can also lose esteem...

-10 when someone votes one of your items down
-100 if you're banned from a group, or if you lose a follower
-500 if you're flagged for posting offensive content or commercial content without accrediting yourself as having a commercial interest

To help keep thing from getting crazy, each member is limited to a certain number of votes per day (up or down; we'll warn you when you start getting close to your limit), and nobody can earn or lose more than a certain number of points per day from votes. Also, there is a cap on the esteem you can earn for any single piece of content - after a certain number of "up" votes, people can still vote the item up, but you're esteem won't increase as a result. Similarly, a single item can never make you lose more than a fixed amount of esteem points.

So how do you get started? Start answering questions! That's ultimately what this community is all about, so posting useful, accurate answers - which other users then vote up - will start you on the path to becoming an esteemed member of our community. You should also take the time to vote on the content that you read here. Doing so helps our community work by awarding esteem to those who have earned it.

Voting

So when do you vote on an item?

Vote an item "up" if you find it to be a useful, accurate piece of technical content. You don't necessarily need to agree with any opinions expressed (such as the "best" way to do something).
Vote an item "down" if it is flat-out inaccurate, rude, incomplete, or otherwise unhelpful. Don't vote an item down just because you don't agree with any opinions (instead, post your opinions so that people can see both sides). Don't vote questions down because you think they're to "n00b" or because they've been answered elsewhere (respond to the question with a link to the answer).

Note that the community has an internal system of checks and balances. Members who cast a disproportionate number of "down" votes can eventually lose their ability to participate within the community.

We also have a variety of automated processes and human volunteers who look for people trying to "game" the esteem points system. Members who are patently trying to "cheat" or "beat" the system in order to artificially inflate their esteem, or to deflate someone else's, may lose their ability to participate within the community. Please... play nice.

If you're interested, we have more extensive voting guidelines that you can review.

Favorites

You'll notice a small "heart" next to most types of items when you're viewing the item. Clicking this heart saves the item as a "favorite" to your Dashboard, so that you can find the item again more easily in the future. This is great for "bookmarking" useful techniques, URLs, and so forth.

Fans / Following

Each piece of content posted by a community member includes their signature. In their signature, you'll notice a link that says "Be a Fan." This allows you to "follow" that user, and see the new content that they contribute right in your dashboard. Use this when you've found someone who regularly contributes content that you find especially useful.

A bonus of being a fan is that any questions you ask will be brought to the attention of everyone you're a fan of. We assume that you're a fan because of their expertise in a given subject, and so it makes sense to highlight your questions for them, since they're more likely to be able to offer a useful answer.

Achievements

Users are automatically recognized for certain special achievements within the community. These recognitions are displayed as small icons within the user's signature:

A is for Advisor - someone who has had 50 or more accepted answers in the past 12 months
B is for Blogger - someone who has published 50 or more upvoted blog entries in the past 12 months
C is for Celebrity - someone who has accumulated more than 500 followers
D is for Donor - someone who has contributed 50 or more upvoted items to our Library
F is for Founder - someone who joined during our public beta
G is for Good Citizen- someone who has regularly voted (up or down) on other people's items within the past 6 months
P is for Podcaster - someone who has published 10 or more upvoted episodes within the last 12 months
$ is used to designate business accounts, which are owned by businesses and may be used to post commercial content such as white papers; we don't expect as much objectivity or brand-neutrality from our business members

Flagging

Content can be flagged as "offensive" or "commercial."

Offensive content contains inappropriate words or phrases that don't belong on our community
Commercial content is somethign which is obviously an advertisement, but which is trying to masquerade as something else. Just because a user mentions a commercial product does not automatically mean you should flag the content.

If enough members flag a piece of content, it will be removed, and the author penalized 500 esteem points.

Business Members

Our community encourages the participation of businesses, and allows businesses to create a "business member account" within the community. Any content posted by business members is permitted to contain advertising or biased statements; their content is flagged as being posted by a business member, so that everyone has an appropriate expectation. Individual employees of a business are permitted to have their own, non-business accounts - provided that the content they post using those accounts is objective and non-commercial.