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1. How Do I Use The Wiki?
2. How Do I Get My Own Avatar?
3. I Have A Few Questions About The Store?
4. I Want To Write For The Blog?
5. What Does The Rarity Rating In The Discography Mean?
6. What Is FLAC And How Do I Download From The Bootlegs Section?
7. How Do I Pin My Location To The Member Map?
8. How Do I Find What I’m Looking For?
9. What Is RSS And What Feeds Are Available For The Site?
10. How Can I Promote The Site?
11. How To Unsubscribe From The Email Subscription Service?

How Do I Use The Wiki?

First of all, you must be registered and logged in, to make any edits to the wiki. Once that is done, click the “Add New Page” link in the dropdown menu to create a new page or “Edit A Page” to make changes to an already existing page. All wiki editing is done in the backend of the site using the WordPress text editor. Not only can you write text, but you should be able to upload images and embed YouTube videos to your wiki pages to improve upon them. For help in how to use the WordPress editor, check out this guide. It speaks about making blog posts, but it is just as applicable when it comes to the wiki.

When on a particular wiki page you can edit it immediately by clicking “Edit Page” tab at the top of article. A wiki page can also be reverted to a previous version by clicking on the “Revisions” tab.

When writing in the wiki use H2 tags for your sub-headings. Not only will this help to format the wiki page better, it will also produce a table of contents in the sidebar based on those H2 tags.

You can also add meta info to each wiki page that will appear in the sidebar widget. This meta info for instance could be the release date of a particular album, duration lengths times etc…

To be notified instantly by email, the next time someone makes an edit to a particular wiki page, check the tickbox labeled “Enable E-Mail Notifications” on the editor screen for that page.

I Have A Few Questions About The Store?

Through the store you can buy all of Massive Attack’s many albums and singles as either physical releases on CD and vinyl or as high quality mp3 downloads. The store is divided into different geographical regions - the UK, US, France and Germany. Choose the one closet to you.

The store is run in conjunction with Amazon. No products are physically handled by MASSIVEATTACK.IE; we are a third-party Amazon affilate helping to sell products for Amazon. However, if you buy via this site we will get a cut from whatever you spend, which will help with the running costs. All purchases through the store will be very much appreciated.

How Do I Get My Own Avatar?

You automatically recieve an avatar, known as an identicon, upon first logging into the site. An identiconis a cool little abstract graphic which is based off your IP address, so everyone should technically have a unique one. Obviously though you will probably want to personalise your avatar at some time. There are two ways to do this and both supersede the identicon.

The first method is to sign up the to the Gravatar service, and Gravatar enable your email address. This must be the same email address you signed be for MASSIVEATTACK.IE originally. This will also have the added benefit of having your chosen avatar being automatically used across other WordPress blogs were you leave your email address. Pretty neat!

The other, and old faithful way to get your own personalised avatar on the site is to simply upload it directly from your site profile page.

Whichever way your getting your avatar, Identicon, Gravatar or uploaded directly, it is used for your forum profile and for any comments you leave on the blog.

I Want To Write For The Blog?

If you have something Massive Attack related you would like to get off your chest, rather than simply posting it in the forum, you can make a blog post about it and get the extra exposure that comes with it. Contact me, Richard, the site admin, and I can set you up with blog posting privileges. Please know that if you want to write for the blog then you must follow a few guidelines:

• Your post must be original and must have never been published before on the Internet.
• You agree to not publish the post anywhere else (i.e., in your own blog or as a guest post in other blogs).
• No offensive material or content.
• Properly format your post and try to make a header image for it. Use H2 header tags.

What Does The Rarity Rating In The Discography Mean?

That’s just my own subjective opinion about how rare and/or valuable a particular item is in Massive Attack Discography. Some may disagree , but I just base it off how often I see a particular item appear online for sale.

Any item that has a one star rating should be easily purchasable in any good record shop. Nearly all of Massive Attack’s albums should be in this category. All Itunes releases also fall under this heading as well.

Any item that has a two star rating is harder to find than before but still not to difficult especially if you have access to the internet and can purchase online.

You will almost certainly not find these items in any normal record shop and will have to rely on scouring the internet or used record fairs. Despite this, if you have any idea where to look, you should be able to find these releases without too much trouble. Most of Massive Attack’s single and vinyl releases would fall under this category.

A four star rating will mean that this item is quite hard to find and will require a lot more patience or diligent searching to uncover. You might only get very few opportunities a year for the chance to purchase an item in this category.

Anything with five stars is extremely rare and very hard to find. Opportunities to buy such items do not appear very often. It might take several years for such an item to appear on EBay from the last time it was on auction, for example. Suffice to say, that any time they do appear, their price can get pretty steep.

What Is FLAC And How Do I Download From The Bootlegs Section?

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is the file format that all the bootlegs available on MASSIVEATTACK.IE are saved as. It is a lossless audio quality codec that does not sacrifice sound quality as lossy codec’s such as mp3 do. In the taping and audio archiving communities it is generally insisted upon that you do not publicly distribute any live recordings as lossy files. FLAC files can be played back on most modern media players (such as VLAN Player) or they can be converted to WAV files and from there converted to anything you wish.

All bootlegs be they either FLAC or DVD, can be downloaded as packed RAR files from two separate mirrors - Google Drive or Uploading.com. All parts are interchangeable, so for instance, you can download one part from Google Drive while simultaneously downloading the second from Uploading.com, and both should unpack when the time comes. To unpack RAR files, you need a package extractor program such as WinRAR or 7Zip, both of which can be downloaded free.

If you would like to share you own Massive attack recordings or other non copyrighted material then use the Downloads forum to do so.

How Do I Pin My Location To The Member Map?

You can add a pin containing your avatar to the member map, which is on the Member Directory page, to help build up an idea of where all out members out throughout the globe.

To do so, you must go to your site profile page first and then click the link on there that says “Change My Location”. On the next page, enter your town/city and country and you will have a pin on the map! If you don’t want to disclose exactly where you are, then just inputting your country should also work.

Please beware however, that entering your location on your forum profile has no effect on putting your pin on the member map. The “Location” setting on your forum profile is only for use on the forum and not elsewhere across the site.

 

How Do I Find What I’m Looking For?

You have a few options for finding content around the site. The search bar in the site header uses the Google search engine to index and search the entire site. If your looking for something specifically in the forum or wiki, they each have their own built in search functions.

The blog has an archives page for indexing all blog posts be certain criteria - month category author etc… and the sitemap can be used to search all pages outside of the blog/wiki/forum hierarchy.

Hyperlinks that have an arrow next to them signify that they are external links that will take you off-site. Hyperlinks that are crossed out will produce 404 errors i.e the page link is not working.

What Is RSS And What Feeds Are Available For The Site?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU[/youtube]

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Just check the video above to get the lowdown on how RSS works and why you should be using it, if you visit alot of websites.

The main RSS feed for MASSIVEATTACK.IE can be found and subscribed to in the header of the site, beside the social networking profiles. It syndicates content from the blog, forum and wiki into one inclusive feed. If you would rather not get the syndicated content bundled together, you can subscribe to the individual sections of the site (live dates, activity stream updates etc…) by locating the RSS links found in the footer of the site.

How Can I Promote The Site?

The best way to do so is just click the FaceBook like button over at the right on the site header. You also have a few options to subscribe - RSS, the Flickr Group, the YouTube Channel or Twitter. This way you can get the latest content from the site without having to visit, while at the same time helping with the subscriber count. You can also tweet or FaceBook like most of the pages on the site, by using the floating widget box on the left.

If you would like to syndicate the MASSIVEATTACK.IE Twitter feed, then use this piece of Javascript code. It will produce a ticker widget with the latest tweets from the site’s Twitter profile. You can place this on your own site or social networking profile to help promote MASSIVEATTACK.IE using Twitter.

How To Unsubscribe From The Email Subscription Service?

If you want to opt out of getting email updates everytime there is a new blog post, then open anyone of the update emails you recieved in your inbox. Scroll down to the very bottom of the email and you should see some text in small print that looks something like this: