"How did you do that?" The Comic Vine toolbar explained, Part 4

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Edited By cbishop
Date"How did you do that?"ViewAttached to Forum:Previous
03/13/18The Comic Vine toolbar explained, Part 4(Blog) (Forum)Editing & ToolsPart 3
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  • For items 1-11 in the picture above, click this link: Part 1.
  • For items 12-13 in the picture above, click this link: Part 2.
  • For items 14 & 16 in the picture above, click this link: Part 3.
  • For items 15 & 17-24 in the picture above, click this link: Part 4. <--You are here.

Now to continue:

  • 15: Spoiler- Click the spoiler link to open this:

The "Spoiler" is different from the Spoiler Block. The block is meant to hide large amounts of info. The plain Spoiler is meant to hide small amounts of info. Say you wanted to tell me that Dwayne Johnson was going to play Man-Mountain Marko in the next Spider-Man film, but you didn't want to spoil it for everyone else:

OMG! @cbishop! Dwayne Johnson is going to be in the next Spider-Man film! And you'll never believe it! He's going to be playing Man-Mountain Marko! <--Your post... you seem very excitable. Just saying.

That black band over the character's name is the plain Spoiler in action. If you are not meant to see what is in the spoiler, but just can't help yourself, you can hover the mouse over the spoiler, and the text underneath will show. Go ahead and try...I know you want to...I'll wait. Good? Yes, I know- Man-Mountain Marko. I was as surprised as you are. Okay. You can also use the spoiler to play a joke:

OMG! @cbishop! Dwayne Johnson is going to be in the next Spider-Man film! And you'll never believe it! He's going to be playing ...........................................! <--That's just cruel; not like you at all. For shame. <tsk>

The spoiler is good for a variety of things. To set one, you simply highlight the text you want to hide, click "Spoiler," and the black band will appear over your text. To undo it, highlight it again (the banded text will appear as white letters in a blue band), and click "Spoiler" again. The black band will be removed. ...Oh, and FYI: I just discovered that you cannot undo a Spoiler inside of a Quote. You have to undo the Quote first, then undo the Spoiler. Another CV oddity that you can do nothing about.

  • 17: List- Click the spoiler link to open this:

On your profile page, you have the option to create lists about anything you can find in the Comic Vine wiki, and you can use these lists for a wide variety of things. I've used them to track my collection, feature lists of comics with certain ads in them, lists of favorites, etc. What the "List" button allows you to do is to move that list to a blog, forum comment, PM, or even the blog space of another list. So, let's see how that works. First, you click the "List" button, and you'll see this:

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The "ADD A LIST TO YOUR POST" box shows you every list that is on your profile's "Lists" tab. As I just found out, that includes every list that you've ever deleted as well- a CV oddity that will probably be fixed at some point. I've already scrolled this box down to the list I'm going to choose- "Seeing Double: Savage Dragon." You choose the list you want by left clicking on it. You will get a dialogue box that says "Fetching List," and then it will be added to your blog like this:

Seeing Double: Savage Dragon

1. Savage Battle(5/02) Savage Dragon #99.
2. Dragon War, Part One - Preparations for War(12/09) Savage Dragon #155.
3. Dragon War, Part Two - Holocaust In The Hearth of Chicago(1/10) Savage Dragon #156.
4. Dragon War, Part Three - Turning Point(2/10) Savage Dragon #157.
5. Emperor Dragon, Part Eight: This Ravaged World*******(1/11) Savage Dragon #168.

That doesn't look exactly like your list page, right? CV does that automatically, and there's nothing you can do about it. What you get though is your list title displayed in Header 3, and a two-column table with the items you've chosen from the wiki displayed in the left column, and the items' names and any notes you've made in the right column. All of it can be edited. You can change the size of the title and text, delete items, rows, columns- whatever you need to do.

Something I've noticed about moving lists is if your list is larger, it might take a bit for it to transfer over. Only thing to do there is wait. The shorter list I did above transferred immediately.

Something you cannot do: I like to make use of the blog space at the top of my lists. Here's an example:

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That's in the blog space at the top of the list, before you even start seeing the wiki items. If I use the "List" button to bring it to the blog though, the content of the list's blog space won't be there. Again, there's nothing you can do about that, except add it back on your own if you need to.

  • 18: Tweet- Click the spoiler link to open this:

The "Tweet" button allows you to share a tweet from Twitter on CV. It's very straightforward. You click the "Tweet" button, and you get this:

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Then you get your tweet's link from Twitter, copy it, come back to this "EMBED TWEET" box, and paste the URL into the white field:

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Once that's done, you click the green "Insert" button at the bottom right, and your tweet will post:

DID YOU KNOW: Hot Dog on a Stick was originally established as a warning to hot dogs who betray the King.

— Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) March 12, 2018

As you can see, it automatically posts centered on the page, looking like a quote. Like a quote, if you move the mouse to the top of the tweet, you get a little black toolbar:

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You can delete the tweet, or move it Left, Center, Right, Up, or Down without having to retype it:

Left:

DID YOU KNOW: Hot Dog on a Stick was originally established as a warning to hot dogs who betray the King.

— Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) March 12, 2018

Right:

DID YOU KNOW: Hot Dog on a Stick was originally established as a warning to hot dogs who betray the King.

— Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) March 12, 2018

I've found that if you want to post the tweet multiple times, you can do so. However, if you post the tweet, then load a picture, then try to post the tweet again, you'll have to copy the tweet's URL again to be able to post it.

  • 19: Remove Format- Very straightforward here. If you have text in your blog that is full of Bold, Italics, Underline, or Strikethrough, you can highlight it, click the "Remove Format" button, and those effects will be removed. It will not remove Bullet lists or Numbered lists.
  • 20: Clean- Click the spoiler link to open this:

The "Clean" button is an odd little thing. When you start a blog, comment, etc., there's a space already in the upper left corner, kind of like a paragraph indention. If you type with it still there, it will look like this:

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See? It's very small. I'm not even sure why it's there, or why it can't be programmed out so that we don't need a "Clean" button, but I am not a website engineer or computer programmer, so okay, we have a weird space and a "Clean" button. By clicking the "Clean" button, it will get rid of that space. As far as I have ever determined since 2010, that is all that the "Clean" button does. That's it. Everything. Honest.

  • 21: Search- In the picture at the top of the page, you'll see a "Search" field in the bottom left corner with "Tag to pages on the site" just above it. With that field, you can search anything in the wiki, and add it to your list of tags. What that used to do is make it so your blog would show up on every page you tagged it to- there was a space in the right hand column of the page for it. That changed a long time ago, back during one of the Whiskey Media upgrades. NOW, you can still add the tags, but I honestly don't know if they still serve a purpose. Maybe they affect search engines? I'm not clear on it.
  • 22: Save your blog- Click the spoiler link to open this:

Very straightforward- the "Save your blog" button at the bottom left corner allows you to save your blog. When you click that button, your blog is saved to your "Blog" tab on your profile page. So, I've created an empty blog on my profile page that I will have to reuse. No problem for me, but make sure that you don't accidentally post something you don't mean to. However, before you can see your saved blog, another page comes up:

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On this page, you get the option to connect your blog to a forum. The default is "Don't post to the forums." If you don't want it connected to a forum, then all you have to do is hit the green "Save your blog" button again, and you're done. As far as I have been able to determine, the red "No thanks" button does the same thing- saving your blog to your profile page only. If it has any other purpose, I haven't seen what it is.

If you do want to connect your blog to a forum, then you have two options, and I'm not going to show screenshots, because they're pretty simple.

  • The first option is you click on the arrows next to "Don't post to forums" to open the dropdown box, and it will show you a list of the main Comic Vine forums. You choose one, click "Save your blog," and it will be connected.
  • The second option is you click the link that says "(Or search for a more specific forum)," and you search for something in the wiki. Every item in the wiki has a forum: Characters, Teams, Objects, Locations, Concepts, Story Arcs, Volumes, etc. This search option works the same as any other search on CV- you type in what you're looking for, you get a dropdown menu full of items, you choose the one you're looking for, and then click "Save your blog."

If you like comments on your blogs, you want to connect them to one of the main forums whenever possible, because they get higher traffic. If you connect it to a wiki forum, that will still show up in the All Topics forum, so you'll have as much chance for comments as anything else in those forums.

What the wiki forums are good for- what I use them for- is so I can find them in the forums easier to be able to see the View counts on my blogs. If you connect it to a popular wiki page, like the "Batman" character page, you'll still have a ton of pages to scroll through to find your blog. But if your blog is in reference to something like say, the cartoon C.O.P.S., then that forum is much smaller, and you can find your blog and its View counts much faster.

Now, that forum doesn't get visited very often, so the View counts are at the mercy of people seeing the blog in the All Topics forum. In other words- you just have to decide what you want from being connected to a forum, and choose accordingly.

  • 23: Title bar- This is the field where you type in the title of your blog or forum post. Your blog will not post without a title. I don't know about forum posts, because I don't post directly to the forums very often, and I've always included a title the times that I did. I'm not going to test it, because it takes a moderator to get it deleted if it's not connected from your blog, and the moderators are busy enough. I know the Title Bar should be really obvious, but hey, I'm explaining everything else in the picture, so I'm explaining that too.
  • 24: Less- Click the spoiler link to open this:

The "Less" button is for reducing what you see in the toolbar. This is what the whole toolbar looks like:

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When you click the "Less" button in the top right corner, this is what it looks like:

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Now you're just seeing the top row of the toolbar. By clicking the "More" button at the end, it will go back to the full toolbar. That is the sole function of the "Less/More" buttons.

That is everything in the toolbar! I hope this was helpful to you, and that it will be a handy reference in the future. Thanks for reading. -cbishop

Please let me know if this helped you, and thanks! -cb
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amazing_webhead

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now i finally know what 'remove format' & 'clean' do. thanks :)

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@amazing_webhead said:

now i finally know what 'remove format' & 'clean' do. thanks :)

As far as I know, anyway. ;)

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@renchamp@pikahyper

Any chance that there will ever be an update of the FAQ? The one that is there is somewhat outdated. This kind of information would be good to capture in there.

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#4 pikahyper  Moderator

@blueecho: There actually might be a new one, I talked to one of the engineers about it recently and they are open to it, I doubt it will happen when the new site goes live but since they are doing it in stages it probably will happen when they finally change the rest of the site to the same style as the new home page. They probably won't include info like this though but it should be more useful.

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@blueecho: Thanks. :)

@blueecho: There actually might be a new one, I talked to one of the engineers about it recently and they are open to it, I doubt it will happen when the new site goes live but since they are doing it in stages it probably will happen when they finally change the rest of the site to the same style as the new home page. They probably won't include info like this though but it should be more useful.

Is there somewhere I can read more about this? I've heard nothing about it.

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#6 pikahyper  Moderator
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#9 pikahyper  Moderator

@cbishop: I told them they needed to post the announcement to all the forums, only a handful of people know anything about it let alone actually tested it, most of them think it is the new site and post over there...., I've been working on the new version of it for almost three months finding tons of bugs and giving massive amounts of feedback.

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@pikahyper: I’ve actually tried to join on the new site and it didnt work. I had to make an account on here.

In addition, all of the site’s threads were old, is that beta really new?

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#11 pikahyper  Moderator

@terrigenpiss: as has been explained in the announcement thread the beta is just using an old backup of the sites database, all beta sites use test data or older data when testing out a beta, the beta site is completely separate and anything you do on the beta will be deleted when the beta testing period is over. Once the testing period is over the "skin" of the beta will be moved to this site, CV, the data on this site will be unchanged and there will be nothing lost as it is basically just the skin that will change.

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#12  Edited By pikahyper  Moderator

@renchamp: the beta? ya 12 days ago, thread. The both of us and Cloudguy are basically the only people that have tested it out :/

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#13 pikahyper  Moderator

@renchamp: they haven't said anything but I'm pretty sure the new site will go live in the next two weeks cause the second week of June is E3 and we all know nothings is getting done most of that month probably so sooner it is live the more time to work on bugs and changes before E3.

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@pikahyper: Yeah, I went and found the thread you linked after I said I had heard nothing about it. I'm almost never on the Gen. Discussion forum, so I hadn't seen the thread. I'm all for an update, just please, please, please CBSi don't let pictures get mucked up again, like the last three updates- I'll end up in a corner hugging my knees and sucking my thumb, rocking back-and-forth and humming The Ride of the Valkyries. It's not as pretty as it sounds. :}

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#17 pikahyper  Moderator

@renchamp: I miss being able to pin a single thread to all forums, doesn't seem like many people use the All Topics page.

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#19  Edited By pikahyper  Moderator

@renchamp: be prepared for a lot of users asking where their forum is since most are not obviously available on the beta site. and why notifications don't work.

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Grouping all 4 parts together bump. Have a pleasant day. :)

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Thank you so much for this, I'd always assumed that when lists were in blogs it was just a table.

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Thank you so much for this, I'd always assumed that when lists were in blogs it was just a table.

Glad it helps. Hope it saves you some time in the future. :)