Folks, we're interested in anything you want to share with us. The only difference between a news or feature story and a regular forum post is that once approved, a news story will be placed on the site's front page. So, because it will be a little more visible, we'd like it to be a little more disciplined than your average post and follow a few simple guidelines. In general:
- Please spell-check and proofread your entry. Try to be concise and informative while staying on topic.
- If you want to report on something taken from another site's news, please credit them with a link to the story.
- If the story from the other site is simply passing along a link taken from yet another site, then cite the original source of the information .
- Generally, we'd like some kind of photo to go with the story to give it a little front page punch.
- You can also contribute what we'll call "features". A feature is just a simple article about some Transformers-related topic that you think will be interesting to general readers. You can talk about a recent photo you took, provide some background information on an obscure line of toys, or highlight a subtle running change or variant in a new (or old) toy that not many folks are aware of.
- The mods will correct simple spelling and grammatical errors, but if the article needs help in a major way we'll contact you with proposed changes for your approval.
Remember, we generally want at least one image to go along with any story you submit. For a touch of class, you can make your text wrap around the image! Use the following bbcode to achieve this effect:
[wrap={TEXT1}]{TEXT2}[/wrap]...where TEXT1 is "left" or "right", and TEXT2 is what you want your story's main copy to flow around. Typically, TEXT2 should represent either an (http:// or a [thumb]. Confused? I was too--here are a few examples you can cut and paste to use as templates and experiment with:
[code][wrap=left][img]http://www.shootfortheedit.com/forum/image.php?s=1ba40ccc9c9e9328d57de9d2dfdc550b&u=2&dateline=1188591177)[/wrap]This is a story about Michael Bay, isn't he swell, bleah bleah bleah. The image of him is being shown in its original size, and this text is flowing to the left, by which we mean it butts up against the img on the left-hand side of the layout...[/code]
[wrap=right][thumb=100,50]http://www.shootfortheedit.com/forum/image.php?s=1ba40ccc9c9e9328d57de9d2dfdc550b&u=2&dateline=1188591177[/thumb][/wrap]Here's our pal Bay again, because we couldn't get enough of him before. This time, the image of him is being shown at a reduced size, and this text is flowing to the right, by which we mean it butts up against the img on the right-hand side of the layout...Just try copy and pasting those snippets into your post and preview them to see what results they produce, and you should get the idea pretty quickly. Have fun![/img]