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Fark Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Quick Answers

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Quick Answers

I want to create an account

  • To confirm your account, you need to respond to the email sent to the address you provided during creation.

If you do not receive that message, check your junk/bunk folders in case it was accidentally marked as spam.

If you lost the confirmation email, you can still confirm the account by doing this:

  1. click on MyFark link (or go directly to http://www.fark.com/users).
  2. click on the Recent link at the top.

You'll see the system message about the account not being confirmed. You can re-send yourself the confirmation email by clicking on the blue text.

If that address is incorrect - or has changed - you can correct it by clicking on the Edit link at the top of the page and replacing the old address with the new one (don't forget to re-enter your password at the bottom of the page before you click the 'Save profile changes' button)

Then go back to Recent and it should issue a new confirmation email. After you reply to the confirmation email, you will have to wait 6 hours before posting. Spammers and trolls are why that policy had to be put in place.

I lost my Farking password.

If you forget what yours is, all you have to do is fill out the Farkback form and choose "lost password" from the pull-down menu.

Note: You must use Farkback to retrieve your password. We don't answer directly mailed requests.

  • Fark does not automate the password retrieval process since it's pretty easy to fool a bot and Captcha is a huge pain in the ass.
  • If your email is provided by an anonymizing service or requires approval before delivery you will not be able to recover your password.
  • Always choose a secure password. If your password is easily guessed and someone comes along and steals your account, you will not be able to recover that account - even if it's a TotalFark account. You will not receive a refund for a stolen TotalFark account. Stolen accounts are locked-down permanently, so keep that in mind when choosing a password.
  • Change your password often. Just click on the My Fark tab and fill in the blanks.
  • Be sure that your spam filters allow email notifications from Fark.

I want to submit a link.

Use our submission form.

I submitted a link and I don't see it on Fark's main page.

Only a small percentage of the submitted links are hand-picked for Fark's front page. See the Submitting Links section for some hints on how to improve your chances.

I want to buy a banner ad.

Use Farkback to contact our sales staff.

I want to know what's OK to post and what isn't.

See our Posting Rules.

I want to post images and links in my comments.

See our Basic HTML guide.

I want to post a Photoshop.

See our Photoshop FAQ.

I want to post an AudioEdit.

See our Audio Edit FAQ.

I want to post my Farktography entry.

See our Farktography FAQ.

I want to sign up for TotalFark.

Try the TotalFark Signup form.

I'm short on beer money and have to cancel my TotalFark subscription.

The TotalFark Signup form is also the cancel form.

I can't post a comment.

If you are having trouble posting or submitting links, check the Technical Questions section of this FAQ or fill out the Farkback form.

Is your account new? Has it been confirmed via email? New accounts must wait 24 hours before posting and must be unlocked by replying to the confirmation email sent to you at sign up time. If you did not receive a confirmation email, check your Junk/Bulk mail folders first just in case it was filtered out as spam. To have a confirmation email re-issued, simply click on the My Fark Tab and then click on "re-send the confirmation email" to have another confirmation message sent to your address.

I tried clicking on comments for a link and it said it was for TotalFarkers only.

Most of the time, this is because one of us wasn't paying attention (or was drunk) and posted two links to the same story to the front page of Fark. Once we take the duplicate link down, it takes a few minutes for the link to disappear from the page. If you're using our RSS feed, it may not disappear at all. That's normal.

I can't log in to TotalFark.

If you are having trouble logging in, check the Technical Questions section of this FAQ or fill out the Farkback form.

Does Fark have an RSS feed?

Yes. It's here.

  • The RSS is intended as a convenience only. Attempting to create a duplicate of Fark will result in the issuance of a C&D.

How do I search for old Fark articles?

We now have a headline search feature. Just enter some words out of the headline and it'll find everything that matches. TotalFark subscribers can search redlit links too.

Only headlines are searchable. We have no plans to make comments searchable.

Search terms can be individual words, a double-quoted phrase, or you can build combinations using parentheses and boolean operators. A plus sign in front of a word means the word must appear in the results, a minus means it must not. Common words like "and" and "the" are ignored. In general, it works pretty much like Google does.

Searches can be limited to specific topic tags, dates, or URL's by using search terms like +topic:amusing +date:2007-02-14 +url:google.com. Those are the only three fields currently searchable like that, though. Ranges of dates are not yet supported, but will be in the future. Sorting results by date is also planned for the near future.

For the advanced users wanting tips on more obscure search syntax, the query language is pretty close to what Apache Lucene uses. (KinoSearch is what we're actually using.)

I don't like my login anymore and want it changed/deleted.

We can't help you out with that one, unfortunately. We don't delete logins and we don't change account names. Unused or seemingly abandoned accounts are not available for "recycling."

How can I get Fark's links to my site to say something other than just "Some Guy"?

See the very next question... :-)

I want to submit a source icon for my website.

Tired of being "Some Guy"? Improve your image by submitting a source icon for your site. There are only three requirements for this:

  • Your image must be exactly 77 pixels wide by 27 pixels high and under 5k in size. Acceptable formats are .png, .gif, and .jpg.
  • You must include the full URL of your site. If there's more than one URL, list them all.
  • Your image must comply with the rules listed in the posting rules.

Submit your source icons to Drew at Fark dot com. Put "source image" in the subject line and be absolutely sure to include the full URL (or URL's) for your site. All source icons are subject to approval and/or modification. Not all source images will be approved, so don't take it personally if yours is rejected.

Fark looks weird in my browser.

This is covered in our Tech FAQ.

Why is there a red horizontal line above certain posts, especially my own?

The red line marks the boundary between new posts you haven't read and old ones you have.

Immediately after posting a new comment, the only new post is the one you just made, so the red separator line appears above that.

You can turn it off or change its color in your profile.

Where did the HTML assistant buttons for posting comments disappear to?

Most likely you have disabled Javascript in your browser, or are using a browser blugin that selectively blocks it (like NoScript for Firefox). If Javascript is working, you may have simply disabled it in your profile; there's a checkbox to enable/disable it in your MyFark profile.

Why can't I link images on home.comcast.net?

We're still looking into this. As best as we can tell, Comcast migrated some customer websites from an older setup to a newer setup at their end, and if your site hasn't been migrated yet, it issues a redirect that requires cookies to work. The link validation tool we use ignores cookies, so it just redirects in an endless loop and eventually gives up. This is something Comcast is going to have to fix for you, probably by migrating your site to their newer setup. Maybe that just means re-uploading it to a different FTP server. We don't know for sure as none of us are Comcast customers. But if you do know, please tell us so we can update this FAQ entry.

Why can I only submit some New York Times articles and not others?

Some URL's on nytimes.com redirect to other nytimes.com URL's, and for some reason, their redirect script requires cookies. The link validation tool we use ignores cookies, so the redirect fails and the link gets rejected. We don't yet know what the pattern is as far as which URL's work and which ones don't.

I want to ask a question that's not on this list.

Contact Farkback

Does Drew have a contingency plan for Fark in the event of zombies?

No plans in the event of zombies, we're just all screwed

Is there a Fark app for the iPhone / iPod Touch?

We do have an HTML widget that works great as an iPhone Web Clip: simply bring up http://www.fark.com/farkWidget.html in the iPhone's browser, hit the + button, then "Add To Home Screen". Voila. Simple. Use two fingers to scroll through the widget.

Fark doesn't have its own official iPhone app yet, but one is being worked on.

There is at least one third-party unofficial iPhone app for Fark that we know of, and we do have a work-in-progress API to support such apps. (Contact us via Farkback for details if you're writing something.)

Why do I see a thread split into multiple pages, even when I have pagination turned off?

Once a thread gets past a certain size, it forces pagination mode, because loading a huge comment thread all on one page is waaaay too slow.

Aside from database load (at our end), once you get past several megabytes worth of HTML and images, browser memory consumption (at your end) increases, and starts to cause performance problems if your PC doesn't have enough memory... and even if it does, 32-bit browsers will crash once memory usage goes past a certain point.

If you know you have enough memory to handle it, you can raise the number of comments per page in your MyFark profile to maximize the number of comments that appear per page.

How can I help track down a bad ad?

We work hard to keep Fark clean of bad ads. However, we don't hand-pick all our ads. We sell some ads directly, and the rest of our inventory goes to remnant advertising networks. Google Adsense is one, but we work with a few others. Remnant advertising networks will often fill some of the inventory with their own ads, but also pass some ad impressions on to their own advertising networks, and so on down the line. This is why bad ads are sometimes hard to track down.

Here's the information you can give us to help us track down a bad ad:

  • Ad Trace - this is the single most helpful thing you can provide...with this we can identify which network is serving the bad ad and kill it immediately. See instructions below.
  • Source URL (sometimes you can get this by right-clicking the ad, other times you need to do an ad trace)
  • Destination URL of the ad (click on it and get the URL it goes to)
  • Screenshot of the ad
  • Description of what it's doing wrong
  • Your location and the time (in local time) you saw the ad

How to get an Ad Trace

Getting an ad trace is similar in most browsers, but some require extra tools.

INSTRUCTIONS:

  1. When you get a bad ad, you right-click on the ad (or anywhere else on the page, especially if it's a Flash ad), and choose 'Inspect Element'.
  2. If you were able to click 'Inspect Element' on the ad itself (which means it wasn't a flash ad), then everything should be showing that needs to be showing. Skip to Step 8.
  3. If you weren't able to 'Inspect Element' on the ad itself, then do a text search to find the ad:
    • topAd728x90 - the long skinny ad at the top of the page
    • rightAd300x250 - the box ad at the top of the right-hand side
    • rightAd300x250Lower - the box ad further down the page on the right-hand side
  4. Expand that line.
  5. Underneath there is a line that will start with '<div id="google_ads_div_' and will end with either 'Leaderboard' (very top ad), 'Billboard' ('boxy' ad in the upper-right), or 'Billboard-Lower' (the lower 'boxy' ad). Expand that.
  6. Expand the '<ins...' line, the '<ins...' line under that, and then the '<iframe...' line under that.
  7. Under the '<iframe...' element, expand the 'body' tag. Make sure any lines under that are expanded as well. A screenshot of what we need is here: Screenshot.
  8. Screenshot it ('Print Screen' button on Windows, and then paste into Word, or command-shift-3 on Mac saves screenshot to Desktop).
  9. Right-click on the '<div id="google_ads_div_' and select 'Copy as HTML'. Paste into any text document (Word, TextPad, TextEdit, Pages, etc)
  10. Send the screenshot and the text document to mfalcone@fark.com and/or meg@fark.com, or put them online and send the link to Farkback.

For reference, here are the types of ads that are allowed and are not allowed on Fark.

NOT allowed on Fark:

  • Expandables - ads that expands when you roll over it.
  • Audio ads - ads that starts playing audio immediately.
  • Pop-ups/Pop-overs/Pop-unders - ads, including surveys (with the exception of the Scorecard Research survey - see below), that pop up new windows on top (or under) the current window, or slide across your screen.
  • Malware - anything that tries to get you to install anything on your system.

Allowed:

  • Click-to-do something ads: If you have to click to expand an ad, play audio, open a window, etc., those are allowed.
  • Video ads: Video ads without audio are fine. At times we've had reports of these slowing down a user's system. If this happens to you on a specific ad, report it.
  • Interstitial ads: An intermediate ad that appears when you click a link that takes you off of Fark to another site. We run these very rarely, and when we do, they show up once per day for non-logged-in users. If you see one multiple times a day, there's something wrong and you should report it.

What is this Scorecard Research pop-over survey I'm seeing?

Short version: It's legit, safe, and the collection of this information is extremely important to keeping Fark operational long term.

Long version:

There is one pop-up/pop-over that's allowed. This isn't from an advertiser - it's from comScore, which is an Internet marketing research company that tracks information on websites in terms of each site's overall traffic, demographics, etc. Fark's ranking on comScore is the major criteria used by every advertising agency that is considering Fark for an ad buy, which is the primary way that Fark makes money to stay operational. This survey is important because it's the only way for comScore to collect accurate data about Fark users. This, in turn, not only helps Fark stay in business, but also means you see better ads (think Venture Brothers vs. teeth whiteners). Your data is safe with comScore. They have been around 10+ years as a reputable data company and work with several major privacy organizations. Your survey answers will never be identified with you, but only used in aggregates about Fark users in general. For more information, see the Scorecard Research privacy page.

scorecardresearch.png

The pop-over survey is from Scorecard Research and in big letters says, "Tell Us About Your Online Usage". This will let them gather a bit of data to form a better view of who Farkers are. It's up to you whether you take it or don't take it, but it is helpful in terms of raising Fark's profile.

What's the difference between a moderator and an admin?

The short version is that moderators deal with comments, and admins deal with links.

Admins do the approving and removing of links. Moderators can't do that; they can only remove comments.

Submit a Link »
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