How do I become a citizen of DevHood?

To register, sign in using your Passport.NET account. If this is your first time signing in you will be automatically redirected to a registration page where you can customize your user information. Once this registration is submitted, your name will be added to the member directory and you can begin using DevHood. Remember to check out MyHood once you've signed up.

If you don't have a Passport.NET account yet, get one, it's free.

Why am I a peasant?

All citizens of Devhood participate in an experience point system and can progress through various castes as their experience accumulates. Associated with the pride and prestige bestowed upon players of higher castes is an increasing influence on the Devhood realm. Some of the more well-known rights available to higher castes include access to restricted areas of the site, forum moderator status and the ability to punish lower castes at a whim. Other privileges enjoyed by higher caste citizens have yet to be revealed to lower caste members.

The caste progression is:

• Peasant
• Squire
• Soldier
• Archer
• Field Commander
• Knight
• King
• Wizard

Experience is rewarded by Devhood through the submission of tutorials, tools and news, commenting on submissions and participating in discussions in the message forums. However, other citizens also influence your experience points through gifts and punishments by rating your submissions. The higher the caste of a rating citizen, the greater influence of his gift/punishment For example, if a King gives a Peasant's tutorial submission a 5, the Peasant could potentially become a Level 3 Squire. However, on the flipside, if a Knight decides to give a Soldier's tool a 1, that Soldier could very easily be demoted to a Squire once again. Therefore be wary of your contributions to Devhood. Excellent work will be rewarded handsomely, but failures will not go unpunished.

How do I gain experience points?

Here is a brief explanation of our caste system and how to obtain experience points on DevHood.

What's up with message ratings?

Goal:
Message ratings is a privilege given only to Devhood citizens with at least a caste level of archer. It was implemented with the purpose of rewarding members who contribute meaningful posts to the forums and punishing members who post junk. The rating is on a scale of 1 to 3 with 3 being the best rating. Rating a message will affect the experience points of the poster; a rating of 1 will have a negative effect, a rating of 2 will have no effect, and a rating of 3 will have a positive effect. The exact amount of change is weighted based on the rater's caste, for example it takes two archers' ratings to affect one point, but a wizard can change the rating by four points with each rating.

Rules:
You have to be signed in to rate, you can't rate your own messages, and you can only rate each message once.

Guidelines:

Rate 1: The message is meaningless blather or was obviously posted in order to gain a quick point. Casual conversation is not included in this. However, one or two word responses which are posted thoughtlessly should receive consideration for a "1" rating. Also, all users who post in abusive threads should receive a one, even the ones who are reprimanding the offenders. By posting in the thread and dragging out the issue, you are only contributing to the problem.
Rate 2: When in doubt, don't rate at all or rate a 2.
Rate 3: This message provided you with helpful information that was worth your time, or it brings up an insightful and thoughtful discussion.

The rating system should not be used as a measure of:

• whether you agree or disagree with the poster's opinion of "the cutest girl", "favorite band", or "operating system of choice."
• how much you dislike the person

What is myHood?

myHood is a personalized section of Devhood where you can customize your content, edit your account information, and keep track of your contributions to Devhood.

You can customize your content in myHood by managing your Devhood Bookmarks, favorite users, ignored users, newsletter frequency, subscriptions, email alerts, and the new content that appears on your myHood page. In addition, you can see which Devhood users have marked you as favorite.

myHood also lets you edit your personal account information and the contents of your public page. You can include a homepage, a bio, and a photo for your public page.

Finally, whenever you contribute to the site, your contributions will appear on your myHood page. You can see which one of your tutorials are pending approval, which ones have been approved, and navigate to your saved tutorials. Your recent message posts will also appear on your myHood page.

I'm having trouble logging in, what should I do?

This website is still running on beta2 bits of ASP.NET and the .NET Frameworks and have been experiencing difficulties with passport authentication. Users have reported that clearing out their cookies, closing the browser then signing in again seem to fix most of the problems. Problems also seem to usually arise when the "Sign me in automatically" box is checked, so try leaving that unchecked if you can deal with typing in your password each time.

We have a copy of Release Candidate 0 of the .NET Frameworks and are experimenting with that now. RC0 is supposed to clear up a lot of the problems associated with Passport and ASP.NET.

How can I stop seeing postings by citizens I don't like?

If there is a citizen that is annoying you or you just don't want to see anymore posts from someone just choose to "ignore" them by going to their public page (click on their name on any page) and then click on "Mark Ignored". From that point, you will no longer see any posts by that citizen.

To remove a citizen from your ignore list, just go to your MyHood page and delete their name from the "Ignored Users" list.

How do I keep up to date on what another citizen is doing?

If there is a certain citizen that has caught your fancy and you want to be able to find them again at a later date, the easiest way is to add them as a "Favorite". You can do so by going to their public page and clicking on "Mark Favorite". To view your favorite citizens, just go back to your MyHood page where you can send them personal messages and find out what they've recently posted.

What Types of News Articles Get Approved?

There aren't any hard metrics on getting news articles approved, but here are some tips. When we evaluate the submissions, we look at how much interest a submission will generate in the Devhood community and approve those articles.

• How relevant is the article to DevHood users?
• How interesting is the article for DevHood users?
• How recent is the article?
• Does the summary give a good sense of what the article is about?
• Does it prompt the viewer to want to read the rest of the article?
• Does it prompt discussion about the article?

In cases where we recieve multiple articles on the same topic, a thoughtful summary becomes one of the most important factors in deciding who gets approved. As a general rule, summaries that simply cut and paste the first couple sentences rarely get approved.

Finally, please remember that we recieve many submissions each day, and sometimes a good article with a good summary is rejected just because there are others that we thought would be more interesting for the community. With the news section, our main goal is to create a fun, interesting environment where people can keep up with recent developments and engage in thoughtful discussion.

What is the scope of DevHood?

DevHood was intended for people looking for help with .NET technologies. However, if you have questions about anything feel free to post them up or request a category. If there is significant demand for branching out, the scope of DevHood will expand to accomodate the users.

We're here to help you, so just let us know what you want to see.