back to info pages
Personal Accounts
Groups
Articles – Events
Features
Promoted Newswire
Open Newswire
Events
HTML Editing
Videos
Hidden Articles, Events and Videos
Tagging/Categories/Places
Comments
RSS SSL
Mobile Indymedia Site
Old Site
Personal Accounts
On the new site, you can register a personal account. You have to give a User Name and Password.
When you publish anything while logged in, you will be able to edit your contribution later on. This means the content you publish will be tied to your user ID. For the time being the user name will not show up as the author, but this might change.
If you report an article through “report or administer this article” form at the bottom of each article, an email will be sent to the publicly archived mailing list, citing your user name.
If you do decide to give an email address, and we see that you are frequently reporting abuse or suggesting good stuff for promotion, we might get in touch with you to offer you hiding and promoting privileges on the site. Giving an email address will also enable you to retrieve your password in case you forget it.
Groups
Registered users can register groups. Groups are listed in the groups section with a short description of who they are and what they do, and have an own page listing all their articles, events and media (e.g. the Indymedia London Collective). This can be useful for both groups and campaigns. Any member of the group can publish content as part of that group and add or delete other members. Think of it like a blog, but better!
The content of these Groups pages is entirely up for the group’s members. A group can publish in its own page texts, videos, photos and audio files collected in an audio playlist. These can then be played individually, or as an entire playlist straight from the group’s page. As an example of this check out the Disident Island’s group page
A group can also run it’s own Timeline of Events independently from the main site. This may be useful if a group or a campaign is involved in an action or a mobilisation and wishes to report it as it happens in real time. These Timelines can then be linked from reports or features in the front page of the site. As an exaple of this see the IMC-London Timelines of Events during the London Climate Camp 2009 here and here.
Articles – Events
The new site is composed of two major sections: news and calendar. In short anything that has already happened and is being reported is an article, anything that has not yet happened and is being announced is an events. On the front page the news are in the main column on the left and the events are in the middle column.
Features
Features are well written reports with some background information and at least one image. A feature will most likely revolve around a major campaign or current issue that is of wider interest, and link to previous posts on the same issue, thus “pooling” the available information.
We aim at a quick turn around, with features changing daily instead of lasting weeks. Any well researched and written article can be turned into a feature, it might be yours, if you put in the effort.
Promoted Newswire
Articles get promoted when they are well written and informative. Promotion means they will appear in the Promoted Newswire on the front page.
We need your help with moderation, be welcome to suggest articles for promotion by sending an email to the London editorial list (don’t forget the url!) or using the “report or administer this article” link at the bottom of the page. This will send an email to the same mailing list, if you are logged in, including your account name.
Open Newswire
The new site still has an open newswire, but it is no longer on the front page and as prominent as before. This is part of our attempt to make Indymedia London a better resource for the community and more enjoyable. We want to encourage good writing and reporting by highlighting quality contributions.
If important information is lacking, the article contains too many caps, no grammar or other crimes against style, they will remain in the open wire, but will not appear on the front page.
Events
The features and promotions with the events works similar to the articles. Five featured events appear at the top of the column followed by ten promoted events and the poster of the next upcoming featured event.
In the events section you can choose between a timeline or calendar view and listings for specific months, weeks or days.
Video
Whenever someone uploads a video, our server keeps a full-quality copy of it so that you can download it for screenings. However, we don’t currently have the capacity to serve these big files ourselves. Instead, we offer a download via Bittorrent, a peer-to-peer filesharing sytem.
In order to download the full-quality video, you will need to have some software installed on your computer. Basically you have two choices:
* Bittorrent + VLC
* Miro
Bittorrent + VLC
Bittorrent software shares the file you’re downloading with other people as you download it. If you want to help us distribute video files, please leave your Bittorrent client open after your download finishes and you’ll be donating your bandwidth and making everyone’s downloads faster.
All of the full-quality video has been converted into a free format called Ogg Theora. The easiest way to watch them is to use the excellent VLC video player which you can download here. Alternatively, you may download the Ogg plugin for Quicktime, or Ogg plugin for Windows Media Player.
Hidden Posts
Articles and Events that advertise commercial events or products, promote party politics, are discriminatory or breach the Editorial Guidelines in any other way will be hidden.
Hidden articles are still there and you can get them if you have the direct url. However they will not be listed or linked anywhere on the page and will not be indexed by search engines (meaning you won’t be able to “google” them).
If you think a posting breaches our Editorial Guidelines you can help us keep the site clean by sending an email to London editorial list (don’t forget the url of the posting!) or using the “report or administer this article” link at the bottom of the page (this will send an email to the same mailing list, if you are logged in, including your account name).
HTML editing
The publishing form contains a basic html editor, for bold, italics, underlined text and links in the text. Be careful with the bullett points as they sometimes do weird stuff (we’re trying to figure out why). Making links in the text is very easy, just mark the words that you would like to be a link and click the link button (looks like chain link). It will ask you to enter the link url in a little pop up window. Remember to include the http://, to avoid mistakes, just copy and paste from the address bar of your browser.
The html editor that opens when you click the html button in the toolbar will accept some basic html tags (such as links) but strip most; they will appeare as normal text. This is not to drive you mental, but to keep the site safe for all users.
Tagging/Categories/Places
We do not have categories as such anymore, using tags instead. To make it easier to navigate the site, make sure to tag your texts properly. There will be “suggested” tags with tickboxes on the publish form including some of the major categories, but also upcoming events.
The tags are separated by spaces, so use _ for longer ones, e.g. free_spaces instead of free spaces. The same goes for places. If you tag something at being in “Aldgate East” it will later show up as Aldgate and East in the tag cloud, so use Aldgate_East instead.
Comments
When publishing an article you will be able to decide whether or not to allow comments. It’s not always an easy choice as comments often enable other users to add interesting information, express solidarity or point out mistakes and ask for clarification. On the other hand Indymedia has seen a lot of “flamewars” in the comments, discussions that turn quite nasty with lots of abusive language and such. If this happens in the future, the commenting function might get disabled for certain articles. The Editorial Guidelines apply to comments as well as any other content on the site.
If you post comments, remember that indymedia is a news platform, not a discussion forum. Comments exist for posting genuine additions or requests for clarification, additional or contradictory information. If your opinion differs from the author’s, remember that this is the wrong place for discussions. If the issue is important to you and you want your opinion to be visible, make the effort to write an article representing your point of view.
Whatever you do, be respectful of each other.
RSS feeds
Exist, explanation soon to come, check out our feed center
SSL, Security Certificate Warning (Firefox 3.0)
SSL explanation soon to come
If your using Firefox 3.0 you will get scary security warnings when moving to an encrypted connection. Don’t worry too much about it. Click “Add Security Exception” to go on.
Certificates are the digital equivalent of a government issued identification card. Certificates, however, are usually issued by private corporations called certificate authorities (CA). Indymedia UK has, instead, chosen to use CA Cert, a free and non-profit certificate authority. Sadly browsers don’t automatically accept these certificates. (find out more)
Mobile Indymedia Site
Coinciding with the Camp for Climate Action, August 2009, a series of new features were introduced so people could use the website whilst on the move.
With people using their phones more and more to access the internet, we spent a bit of time to make a version of Imc London that is mobile friendly, check it out at http://mob.london.indymedia.org.
This means that you are now not only able to check out a reduced version of the site from your mobile phone, but that you can also publish to it using SMS or your phone camera. To allow this, a new form of posting was also introduced: the tumble. This is basically a simplified publish form that you can also use from your mobile phone, and therefore your mobile report will appear straight into the Tumblewire, which is linked form the website’s front page.
These features are brand new, so if something doesn’t work or you find any bugs, please let us know!
Old Site
To view the 2003 – 2008 archives, check our Old Site
