An important note to new users who sign up to the front page of our site. If you are using a bogus email address or do not intend to be an active member, there's no point in signing up. Unverified accounts will be deleted by the system in 24 hours if you do not verify the email address you used.

Here are some tips to get around the new front end of the site and things you will want to know. First of all, all of your blog posts are still here, they haven't gone anywhere, same goes for the forum and any posts, just click on blog or forum to get to those areas. Next, there are several categories for articles on the front page and two states they can exist in. The categories are listed on the left under the area conspicuiously entitled "Categories", if you missed it, it's okay, look more closely, you'll find it. There are currently 5 categories that articles can be published in but more may be added as time goes by. The two states that articles can exist in are published and published to the front page. Articles published to the front page are viewable from "Home" on the main site, articles not published on the front page you need to click the category to see. In this way we can both keep the content on the front page fresh and also make sure that important content that needs to be seen is up front for a while. Articles are also submitted in an "Intro Text" and "Full Text" format, intro text is shown immediately and full text is shown when the "Read More" link is selected at the bottom of an article. This way really long articles can be published to the front page without scrolling on for page after page.

Anyone is free to sign up to the front page and submit articles but only editors are assured of having their content published. We will review any user submitted content and decide whether it's worth publishing to the front end or not. If it isn't, it could be for any number of reasons, if you want to know why, send a private message to an admin after waiting a week to get an answer. If your article is too short, plagurized or just contains way too many spelling or grammatical errors then you probably won't even get past the sniff test.

Aside from submitting articles, there is no benifit to regsitering for an account on the front page, your regular Blam forums/blogs account is a separate entity and will not work here on the front page. So only submit a request for access to the front page if you know you plan to submit articles.

You MAY submit reprinted articles from other sites provided credit is given to the original author and a link-back is supplied and further that you format the article properly and split the article using the intro/full text so that you don't have a big run-on article. Most articles that will appear on the front page for the time being will be of a site-news related nature. Other articles will be available in their respective categories.