Reply To: “Recommended Posts” (was: “Best of the Forums”) – NEWBIES PLEASE RESPOND
Someday we’ll have a glossary, DeeRo. I’m obtuse enough that I don’t even realize that things I say can cause so much confusion, so I’m glad you ask. 🙂
A “thread” (also called “discussion”) is a chain of posts (also called “comments”).
A “wiki” is — well, there are several kinds of wikis out there, but the most important characteristic they share is that they’re a collection of pages where anyone can edit the text. The most famous example is Wikipedia. When we talk about “the wiki” around here, we normally mean JoCopedia, the Jonathan Coulton “encyclopedia” that anyone can edit. MediaWiki is the software that’s used by JoCopedia, and MediaWiki formatting is how to format text on JoCopedia (for instance, to make text italicized on the wiki, you put a pair of single-quotes on each side, ”like this”). HTML is all over the place on the Internet, and you’ll forgive me if I can’t figure out how to explain it, except to say that HTML is used to format comments on the forums and it’s not exactly the same as MediaWiki language. Google will tell you more than I can about all of these.
A “sticky thread” is one that’s “stuck” to the top of a forum — for instance, new forum members ought to be able to find the “Forum Code of Conduct / FAQ Thread” easily, so it’s a “sticky thread” that will stay on the first page.