User:Damërung/Templates/Shoutbox manual

The shoutbox is a useful tool where smaller comments are posted. Examples are, "thanks for .....", "are you online?", "nice edit", "I´ve finished the ......", etc. It can also be used as a semi-instant messaging box where conversations can be held. These are some advantages of using a shoutbox:

• Avoids the need of creating a whole new section to place a small comment
• As consequence of the previous, it prevents overflooding in the talk page (a talk page will be filled eventually with more comments, and the user may have to create archives for storage of the previous discussions, the use of this tool allows to keep clean or compact the talk page, and prevents the early need to use archives)
• For users that are online, this can facilitate the synergy in cooperative edits on wikipedia. For example; if two or more users are working in real time on an article, articles of the same list or articles within the same category, they can communicate about progress or coordination tasks (again, avoiding overflooding)

The shoutbox is intended to be in the talk page, so the user gets inmediate notification of a new message. My intentions in creating this chat-tool are to help in wikipedia´s improvement and enhancement, not to be confused with a WP:NOT violation. The idea of using a shoutbox in talk pages was originally mine (I don´t know of other user who had the same idea as me previously), however, it was inspired by: ♥Soccer5525♥Talk To Me! (so I´m giving his/her corresponding credits)

To place a new comment in the shoutbox, a text in the bottom says "Please make comments at the top. Click here to shout" and it redirects to the edit section of the page. The shoutbox is a fixed object that must be in the first (on top) part of the edit section (the source code) so a user can see an arrow which leads him where to place the comment. The reply is suposed to be in the respective shoutbox of the other wikipedian.

You can change the position in where the shoutbox is placed; in the picture, you can see a line highlighted, that is the code for the positioning stuff. The number "20px" means that the object will separate 20 pixels from the right margins (and 50 pixels (px) from the top margins). The proper separation varies in each user talk page. You can also change the word "right" for "left" and "top" for "bottom" and the code will work accordingly. The code highlighted in the left means that the position from margins will be taken as of the page and not the screen. For example: if you change the word "absolute" for "fixed", the position will be separated from the screen margins (which are not the same). In consequence, the object (in this case, the shoutbox) will stick to the screen, no matter if you scroll down the page. Also, in the section marked below, if you change the word "collapsible" for "collapsible collapsed", with this you can make the shoutbox to stay collapsed all the time by default (untill you press the button "show"), keeping the shoutbox even more compact.

Periodically you must manually clean (delete) the past comments, so the shoutbox is kept clean.

Feel free to send me a message to fix something, answer a question or help in some way. - Damërung ^{...ÏìíÏ...}_{_Ξ_} . --  17:40, 13 June 2009 (UTC)