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New HikiCulture Avatar: An Animated GIF!

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Revised HikiCulture Rules

After constantly having students signing up to the HikiCulture forums out of complete self-interest asking the members of my forum if they could answer questions for them about the hikikomori phenomenon, I felt that it was due time to revise the HikiCulture rules.

First of all, it poses a great danger to the members of my community when these people sign up to my community asking the members to get in touch with them by email, standard mail and the telephone. Some people have even asked if they could videotape the members of my forum. Even if these people who are signing up to ask questions don't have anything bad in mind, I still don't like it because these people are signing up to the HikiCulture forums out of complete self-interest -- they ask their questions, then bugger off.

I initially posted a list of rules in the early days of HikiCulture, but lots of the them were quite silly, so I figured it would be best to delete the old list of rules and create new revised ones (most of the rules are similar to rules from the original list I had.)

Anyway, here's the list:

The rules are taken from this thread on HikiCulture.

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HikiCulture: Bigger Than Jesus?

HikiCulture has been mentioned on quite a few sites; I've seen quite a few mentions ever since the forum received lots of traffic in late October.

Here are three mentions out of the many I've already seen:

http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/2009/11/forum-for-reclusive-people.html
http://www.metafilter.com/86283/Irony-incarnate-a-forum-for-reclusives
http://mrod.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/oxymoron/

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HikiCulture XChat Guide

The following guide will show you how to install and customize XChat. XChat is a good alternative to using the chat-box on the HikiCulture forum and is, in my opinion, the best Windows IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client. It is user-friendly, has a nice interface, has native SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support, among many other things.

Anyway, let's begin with the guide....

First off, download XChat from here: http://www.silverex.org/download/ (*Note* - Make sure to download XChat from the link I provided since that version is free, while XChat for Windows users usually costs money and expires after a month.)

When you're finished downloading XChat, install it (obviously). Now, open XChat. At the top of the screen, click on Settings. Under the context menu, select Preferences.

Now set everything up to be exactly as it appears in the screen-shots below:

Once you're finished setting everything up as it is in the above screen-shots, click on the top-left part of X-Chat where it says XChat. Under the context menu, select Network List.

The following box will come up:

Fill out of all the boxes with username(s) you wish to use whilst chatting on XChat. Once you're finished filling out all the boxes, click where it says Add. After clicking on Add, type IRCHighway then click on Edit.

The following box will come up:

Fill out the info so that it's exactly (minus the stars in the Nickserv box) as shown in the above screen-shot. When you're finished, close the box.

Now, to finish things off you can install a nice XChat theme from the following link: http://t0x.in/xchatthemes.html

Pick any theme you wish to use. I personally use the "Smog" theme, but there are lots of great themes on that page. The installation instructions for the themes is right on the page, so explaining how to install an XChat theme would be redundant.

Now whenever you wish to connect to the HikiCulture IRC channel, all you have to do is open up XChat, click on XChat in the top-left part of the screen, select Network List, highlight IRCHighway and click on connect. After clicking on Connect, you'll show up in the HikiCulture IRC channel.

Enjoy.

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New HikiCulture VIPs

Here's the latest batch of HikiCulture members I've given VIP status to:

Glasses
Porygon
FONEternal
LyricalIllusions
Hitori
Carruthers
Knots
shorelinetrance
gloomba
MobiusBrain
sibirskaya_koshka
geegor

Congrats.

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Mikan: New HikiCulture Moderator

I've made the user Mikan a HikiCulture moderator as I feel she will do a great job of moderating.

Mikan is a relatively new forum-user, but I can already tell that she'll make a great staff-member.

Congrats Mikan.

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To All Current and Future HikiCulture Members: Create New Topics!

I will start off by saying that I am impressed by how active HikiCulture has become, and how much it has grown since creating it in late July of this year (2009). I initially wasn't sure if the forum would ever get more than twenty members (if that). Secondly, I want to say that the amount of new posts being contributed to the site (on most days) is quite impressive, to say the least.

There is one slight "problem" though - there are far too few threads being created.

Some of the HikiCulture boards have less than ten threads in them. Lots of guests who visit this site probably think that the place is somewhat inactive, or doesn't have much to offer when they see that the place has so few threads to discuss things in, thus preventing them from registering.

If every member could create a couple threads a week, or even a new thread a day (some people on the forums I'm on do this), HikiCulture would really have a lot more to offer and would not feel so banal.

Some members have been fine when it comes to creating new threads, but many have created hardly any, or simply no threads at all -- I am not sure if there's a reason for this, but it's a shame.

Don't be shy to create new threads; doing so will help make HikiCulture a better place with much more to offer.

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HikiCulture Milestones: 200 Members, 5000 Posts

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My New "Moogle" HikiCulture Avatar

I was going through new avatars to use on the HikiCulture forums on a near-daily basis without finding feeling full contentment with any of the ones I had used; today though, I found the perfect one:

I had thought about Final Fantasy whilst daydreaming today; I think it's because I long to play another game from the series. While thinking about Final Fantasy (which I am extremely fond of), I thought of Moogles (the name of the creature from Final Fantasy that is in my avatar.)

I decided to add my HikiCulture user-name "Chair" to the bottom-right corner of the avatar to make it somewhat more unique. The typeface I used for "Chair" is the same font and shade of blue (partially) that I had used for the HikiCulture logo.

My new avatar finally makes me feel contentment.

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Poll: What's the Longest You've Gone Without Stepping Outside?

Click on this text to go to poll.

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