User tools
There’s a whole world beyond writing and rating and inviting at Helium. We are building a site that is generated and supported by its community. When you join the community, you can help too. Here’s how:
Flagging with User Tools
Nobody likes a cheater. But let’s face it — people cheat. Helium provides you with special flagging tools to help catch the bad eggs. There are two methods to flag an article:
1. Flag an article during the rating process. At the bottom of the rating screen, you’ll find “Flag this article” for each piece presented. When you click this link, you land on a page that allows you to choose the reason you flagged the article. You may also add a comment on this page.
2. Flag an article that exists on the site by clicking on the User Tools link at the very top of each Helium web page.
The primary flagging options are as follows:
Serious abuses (flag away!):
- Plagiarism: Shame, shame. Someone has copied the text of another writer and submitted it as his own work.
- Adult: Cover your eyes. The article contains adult content that is inappropriate for teens and young adults.
- Profane: Does someone need a bar of soap? The article contains curse words and obscene language.
- Illegal: Cuff ‘em. The article discusses illegal activities or products.
- All caps: THIS IS ANNOYING AND UNPROFESSIONAL. For articles that contain all capital letters. (This violates our User Agreement.)
Content issues:
- Limited: That’s it? The article is too short. Helium has a 400-word minimum.
- Off topic: Huh? For articles that don’t relate to the title — at all.
- Spelling: If itz rilly awfull. For articles that contain a lot of spelling errors.
- Grammar: We loves, the grammars. For articles that have bad grammar and punctuation.
- Formatting: My eyes hurt. For articles that are all one paragraph, every line is short or other visual issues that make them hard to read.
RSS feeds
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically the site comes to you; you don’t need to go to the site. All you need is an RSS reader or aggregator, available free online or for download. Any time you see the RSS symbol, you can click to get the URL to subscribe to a particular title, writer, channel, even your “About Me” page.
Social networking tools
At the bottom of each article, you’ll see a number of links to different tagging, social networking and other useful tools. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s currently available.
- Del.icio.us: A social bookmarking site to tag (categorize), store and share bookmarks.
- Digg it!: A site for sharing and rating relevant Internet content.
- Facebook: A social networking site for professionals, students and everybody else.
- Reddit: This site is similar to Digg, but uses artificial intelligence to filter content according to your likes.
- Google Bookmarks: Uses personalized search through Google to find the sites you frequently visit.
- Yahoo MyWeb: Similar to Google Bookmarks.
- Windows Live: Similar to Google Bookmarks and Yahoo MyWeb.
- Stumbleupon: This site lets you find and share websites and articles.
- Blinklist: Another site for collecting, storing and sharing websites.
- Ma.gnolia: Similar to Del.icio.us, but with newer features.
Print article tool
Find an article that you just have to print out? No problem! From any article on Helium, you can use the “Print” icon. It’s located above each article. Click the “Print” icon to view a print-friendly version of the article, and then click the “Print” button to print it out. Just make sure your computer is networked to a printer.
Email an article
You know the feeling — you’re reading something and before you even finish, you think, “[Mom/Dad/Sis/Bro/BFF] should read this!” We understand how you feel, and that’s why we’ve made it easy for you to email articles to friends, family and colleagues.
To email an article:- Locate the article.
- Click the email icon.
- Complete all fields: To, from, message. (If you are already logged in to Helium, the “from” field will be prepopulated. This cannot be changed.)
- Complete the three-character verification code by typing the letters in the field provided. (This feature is in place to ensure that you’re a human and not a robot.)
- Wait for your friend to say, “Gee, thanks.”
Contact a writer tool
Have feedback for a writer? We make it easy for you to email messages to other Helium members by clicking the “Contact this writer” icon from article pages and “About Me” pages.
When sending a “Contact this writer” email, remember:
- Your email address will be visible to the recipient if the recipient hits reply. Keep comments constructive and positive.
- There is a limit to how many “Contact this writer” emails you can send in a single day. This is a safety valve we’ve put in place to deter spammers. If you’ve hit the limit, you’ll receive the message “Sorry, you’ve reached the maximum number of messages you can send today.” Try again tomorrow!
When receiving a “Contact this writer” email, remember these points:
- When you reply to an initiated “Contact this writer” email, you are opening up direct communication with that member via your own email addresses.
- If you do not wish to receive any further messages from that member, you can click on a link in the initial email to turn off receiving more emails. However, if you engage in communication and decide to turn off communication later, you will have to do so through your own email client.
- You can click a link in the initial email to turn off all Helium “Contact this writer” emails. You can also turn off all Helium “Contact this writer” emails by going to the “Privacy” tab on your “Account Settings” page.
How to email comments to a writer from an “About Me” or article page:
- Find an article that makes you think, “Wow, I wish I could tell this writer [insert flattering/helpful comment].”
- Click the “Contact this writer” icon.
- Type your message in the message body field.
- Complete the three-character code verification by typing the letters in the field provided. (This feature is in place to ensure that you’re a human and not a robot.)
- Click “Send.”
Spell Check
You’ll find the spell-check icon right above the “Write your article here” text box when writing your article.
You can toggle in and out of spell-check mode by clicking on the spell-check icon. If spell check is toggled on, the icon will be highlighted in blue.
Spell check does not check your spelling in ‘real time,’ meaning it doesn’t check spelling as you type along. So if you’ve added more text to your article since your last spell check, you’ll want to check it again before you submit your article (just in case).
While in spell-check mode, misspelled words will appear with a red sawtooth line beneath them. Left-clicking on a misspelled word will bring up a drop-down list of suggested spellings for the word. If you click on one of these suggestions, it will replace the misspelled word. If spell check doesn’t have any suggested spellings, “No Suggestions” will appear in this drop-down list.
You can choose “Ignore Word” from this drop-down list to ignore the suggested spelling for a particular word and remain in spell-check mode. Choosing “Ignore All” from this list will ignore all spelling suggestions and toggle you out of spell-check mode.
Spell check will toggle off automatically if there are no misspellings in your article – a dialog box will pop up with “Finished spell check” in this case. It will also toggle off automatically if you use a suggestion on the last misspelled word in your article.
Remember – you can spell check as many times as you want while writing an article, so spell check often (and then once more for good measure) before clicking “Publish.” Your readers will thank you. And so will we.
Please note that at this time, no accents are recognized by Helium. If an accented word is in your article and not flagged by the spell-check function, the accent and the letter will be dropped from your word.
Embedded Links
You can find the tools to create embedded links right above the “Write your article here” text box when writing your article.
To create an embedded link in your article, highlight the word or phrase in your article where you want to embed a link. You will be able to embed a link only in a whole word or a multiword phrase, not in a partial word.
Once you have highlighted the word or phrase, the ‘create hyperlink’ (linked chain) icon will become active.
Click on the highlighted “create hyperlink” icon to embed your link. Enter the URL in the window that pops up, then click “Insert.” If you enter a URL without the “http://” prefix, the tool will add it automatically.
While you are writing your article, links will be displayed in blue with the linked word or phrase underlined. Links will not be clickable, or live, until your article is active on Helium.
To edit or remove an embedded link while writing an article, highlight the entire linked text. Both the “create hyperlink” (linked chain) and “unlink” (broken chain) icons will become active.
Click on the highlighted “create hyperlink” icon to edit your link. If you want to remove the embedded link, click on the highlighted ”unlink” icon.
Once your article is active on Helium, you can edit embedded URLs by using our Leapfrog feature. For more information, please read the User Guide page on Leapfrog.
Embedded Links Dos and Don’ts
- Do use embedded links to provide sources for your articles.
- Don’t use embedded links to link to your personal or business website. Self-promotion in articles is against our User Agreement. Please feel free to promote yourself on your About Me page.
- Don’t use embedded links to link to adult content. Not cool.
- For more guidance, please see What’s not allowed on Helium in this User Guide.
Google toolbar button
The Google toolbar button allows you to search Helium directly from the toolbar in your Internet browser. At this time, it’s supported only by Google for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. To download the search button and/or the Google toolbar, copy this link into your browser:
http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.helium.com/HeliumGoogleButton.xml
