Cartographers' Guild FAQ

Here you can find answers to questions about how the board works. Use the links or search box below to find your way around.

General Forum Usage

Setting and Profile Features

Reading and Posting Messages

How does Reputation Work?

Reputation is a way of praising someone for contributing to a community atmosphere and posting worthwhile posts and content.

Underneath each persons name when they post is a little icon that looks like scales Reputation Scales. By clicking that you can give a user reputation points for that particular post. But there's some rules. You can't just go blindly handing out reputation unless you really think they deserve it. The term for giving reputation is called "repping" or "giving rep". Try it, I'm sure someones made a good post today and deserves credit!

This website has customized settings for reputation power, here's the basics.

Default reputation: all users start at 0
Register Date Factor: for every 360 days, user gains one point of rep factor
Post Count Factor: for every 1000 posts, user gains one point of rep factor
Rep Point Factor: for every 100 points of rep, user gains one point of rep factor
Min Post Count: user must have 30 posts before rep hits count on others
Min Rep Count: user must have 10 points of rep before rep hits count on others
Daily Rep Count: users can rep 10 times a day
Rep User Spread: you must rep 10 different users before repping the same user again

How does the Awards System work?

The Cartographers' Guild features a modification that allows us to grant visible awards to people for accomplishing specific milestones on the site. These awards are visible as part of every post the recipient makes, and are also visible on the recipients profile page. There's a link in the Miscellaneous drop down on the main menu that shows a list of all currently available awards, and who has received those awards. You can check it out by clicking here also.

Searching

How do I search for something?

The simplest way to search is to use the global search bar at the top of every page. This will allow you to search all available content types. If you want to use a more advanced search, you can use the Advanced Search option.

Advanced Search Operators

There are various search operators that will work when you search (you can of course use multiple operators in a single query)...

AND

The AND operator allows you to search for documents that must contain multiple keywords.
Example: hello AND world

OR

The OR operator allows you to search for documents that contain at least one keyword.
Example: hello OR world

NOT

The NOT operator allows you to search for documents that contain at least one keyword, not not others.
Example: hello -world

Group

Grouping allows you to group keywords together with various other operators.
Example: (hello world)

Phrase

Wrapping keywords in quotes will allow you to search for literal phrases.
Example: "hello world"

Proximity

You can specify a proximity search that tells the search engine that you only want documents if a keyword is within xx words of another keyword. In the example below, we only care about results that have the word "hello" within 10 words of the word "world".
Example: "hello world"~10

Quorum

Quorum matching is a bit of fuzzy logic with your search. In the example below, the query is asking for documents that have at least 2 of the 4 words contained in them.
Example: "hello world earth universe"/2

Strict Order

If you only want search results that contain documents with a certain word before another word, you can do so with the strict order operator.
Example: hello << world

Exact Form

To search for exact forms of keywords, you can do so with this operator.
Example: raining =cats and =dogs

Start & End Operators

The start and end operator allows you to find documents that start or end with something specific.
Example (anything that starts with the word): ^hello
Example (anything that ends with the word): world$
This search system was built with Sphinx for vBulletin 4.

Search FAQ

Select this option if you would like your search to look in the text of FAQ items as well as their titles.

Select an option here to specify how you would like your search query to be treated. 'Any words' will return the most numerous but possibly least relevant results, while 'Complete phrase' will return only results that contain exactly what you are searching for.