User Guide

Valhalla is a place for sharing knowledge and ideas. Valhalla allows users to submit code, as well as science, technology, and engineering-oriented news and articles, and we also affiliate with other IT-related sites. We provide a biography and tags for each affiliate so users can easily find the content they are interested in. Valhalla also has an assortment of fun challenges intended to help users learn more about programming concepts, computer science, engineering, mathematics, and more.

Liability:
• We are not liable for any malicious actions taken by members of our community, and any actions taken under the name Valhalla are not official or sanctioned by Valhalla.
• Any code or tools you use from this site you use at your own discretion and Valhalla is not responsible for any damage that may result from improper use or malicious code.

Code of Conduct:
• As a user you must not submit any plagiarized, copyrighted, or illegal material to this site.
• Users are expected to be kind and respectful towards each other and the members of neighboring communities.
• Administrators reserve the right to deny access to any user who we feel does not respect these rules.

If you have found a bug in the site or have a suggestion for improvement, you can use the submit function. Otherwise, if you need to contact an admin, the easiest way is to join the IRC channel. Information about IRC can be found here. Even if it says that no one is active, an admin is nearly always present and you can leave a message in PM with him or her. If you prefer to use email you can contact an administrator at halls.of.valhalla.contact@gmail.com.

We at Valhalla like to support those who wish to help us improve our site in any way, and so pen-testing is encouraged as long as it does not interfere with the normal activities of members or put unnecessary strain on the server. We ask that you report all findings to an administrator as soon as possible, and your contribution will be rewarded with recognition (in the form of a Hall of Fame post) and possibly a free t-shirt if we feel you have done us a service worthy of special thanks.

When viewing a news story, article, affiliate, or code, clicking the banner will take you back to the main news/articles/codes page. For the challenges section clicking the banner takes you back one level. On all other pages clicking the banner will take you to the main page.

Sessions timeout after one hour.
When not logged in, the 'Online Guests' count will count your IP when you are active within 20 minutes.

You can submit content by creating an account, logging in, and going to the submit content page. From there you can also submit bugs you find on the site and suggestions you have for improving Valhalla.

For news, try to make your articles as unbiased as possible and avoid use of the first person point-of-view. Avoid copy/pasting articles word-for-word. Try to put it into your own words, and cite your sources.

For articles and code, make sure your content is original. Don't steal other people's work, and if you reference someone else's work give credit where it is due.

Here are the max lengths of input fields on Valhalla:
Usernames: 50 characters (ascii)
Titles: 100 characters (utf8)
Descriptions: 250 characters (utf8)
Bodies: 65535 characters (i.e. the max size of a TEXT in mysql) (utf8)
Comments: 500 characters (utf8)
Message Board Posts: 250 characters (utf8)
Debugging Challenge Submissions: 500 characters (utf8)

You are still able to see your own email if it is set to be hidden. It is hidden from all other users except for administrators.

You have to enter your current password in order to make any changes to your profile.

The title is just a rank based on your percentage of challenge completions. The titles are based on these percentages:

Upper Boundary	Title
12.5%	Thrall
25%	Barbarian
37.5%	Warrior
50%	Chieftain
62.5%	Thane
75%	Runemaster
87.5%	Valkyrie
100%	God

• Avatar URLs must be 150 characters or less including the 'http://' or 'https://'.
• Avatars must be images ending with .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, or .bmp. If your desired image is not one of these formats, open it in an image editor and save it as one of these formats and then upload the image somewhere.
• Avatars are 100px by 100px. If your image is larger it will be scaled.
• Signatures are 600px wide and 200px tall. Anything extending past that will be truncated.
• You may use BBCode in your signature.
• Signatures have a max length of 250 characters. Anything more will be truncated.
• Do not put anything obscene as your avatar or in your signature; if you do, you will be warned and forced to change it, and if it happens again you will be banned.

Reputation points are a way of giving recognition to users for their contributions to the site and the community. A user's reputation point total is calculated based on your submissions, votes on content you've submitted, hall of fame entries, and other points awarded. The formula looks like this:
    (10 points * number of articles/codes/news submitted) +
    HoF points +
    (1 point * number of upvotes) +
    (-1 point * number of downvotes) +
    Other points given by admins for special contributions (such as good forum posts).

Decimal numbers in your answers should separate the whole number and the fractional portion with a '.' sign. So one and a half should be written as "1.5".

Yes, and it's encouraged. If you have an idea, just create it and submit it to an admin via IRC or email. If you have an idea for a new challenge category that is encouraged as well. You will receive credit in the form of a Hall of Fame entry for any challenges that are accepted.

• No flaming (e.g. insulting, bullying, or other hostile action).
• No posting profane material such as nudity, gore, etc.
• No linking to hacked sites.
• No asking how to hack sites.
• Be friendly and courteous to others even when they don't deserve it.
• Stay on topic. Off-topic posts will be deleted.
• Check if your question has already been answered before creating a new thread.
• Don't give out challenge answers or post spoilers.
• Avoid bombarding other members with questions about challenges.

The outbox size limit is 15 messages. If you send a new message when you have 15 already, the oldest one will be removed from your outbox. The inbox is unlimited.

While the Valhalla staff do not read your messages, our developers are able to see them in the database, so it's recommended that you don't post any personal information.

The updats page gives three different filters: 'Show Only Content Updates', which shows when a new affiliate or code/article/news story is put on Valhalla; 'Show Only Site Updates', which shows updates created by admins about site functionality; and 'Show All Updates' which shows all the previously mentioned things as well as new user registrations and comments on codes/news/articles.

Contact an administrator (see 'How do I contact an administrator?') and provide him or her with information about your site (title, url, description, tags, and detailed bio) and we will review your site and determine whether or not to add it to the list of affiliates. In return, we ask that you add us to your affiliate list if you have one, or make a news post on your main page about Valhalla.

On the members page, you can click on the alphabet letters at the bottom to narrow the search, and you can also enter all or part of a username in the URL bar after the "name=" part. You can use * as a wildcard, and note that the search string automatically assumes a wildcard at the end. The pound sign (#) by itself represents all non-alphabetic characters, but if you include other characters along with it then it will be treated as just a normal # sign.

To start designing your own theme for Valhalla, download the standard css from here. You can modify any of the colors, images, fonts, styles, etc. It's probably easiest to save the rendered HTML from a few pages to test your work. You can then contact an administrator via IRC or email. You'll need to send your modified css along with any new images that are necessary and a name for your theme.

Rules:

• Do not post challenge answers on the message board.
• Be nice and courteous. No flaming.
• Don't spam with excessive posts or attempts to hack the message board.
• Linking to an interesting site (or your own) is okay, but excessive advertising is frowned upon.

Other Important Information

• Any messages you submit within 10 seconds of a previous submission will be ignored.
• If you are viewing the first page, it will automatically refresh the messages periodically. This feature requires Javascript and AJAX support.
• Messages should be 250 characters or less; anything longer will be truncated.