Sweeble tips and FAQs

I'm here, what now?

Okay, you've registered (not yet? Well what are you waiting for?!) and the first thing that seems to happen is four of the stories disappear from the home page. DON'T PANIC. It's meant to do this.

What's happened is that, now you're a sweebler, you've got a personal homepage that you can configure to show the types of news stories you're most interested in - those blank spaces are waiting for you to choose what you want to put in them.

Go have a look around Sweeble, apart from reading stories and comments you'll find plenty of ways to get involved. Post a story or a video of your own; start or join a conversation on the You Say comment board; comment on another sweebler’s story or vote them a sweebstar; help build the Sweeble Wikipops library of popular information; browse the classified ads or sell/swap your own stuff. There's a lot here and more on its way before we're out of beta.

Do I have to set up my home page?

No. Just click on the big sweeble logo and it'll take you back to the generic homepage.

How do I customise my home page?

Select 'Configure your homepage' from your homepage menu box (or from under ‘My details’ within ‘My Sweeble’). You’ll get a form with four story boxes – these are story boxes 3 to 6 on your homepage. For each story box, choose whether you want the most recent or the most popular story in a category (eg 'Crime'), or whether you want to use the keyword search to have stories appear according to the subject (eg 'Hull').

Don't forget to click the circular button to select either ‘category’ or ‘keyword’ or it will ignore you.

Then click 'Save changes' and it will automatically take you back to your newly set-up homepage.

How do I post a story on Sweeble?

Select 'Post story' from the menu bar or wherever you see the link on pages, and the ‘Post a story’ form will open. You will need to select a category for your story to appear in before you will be able to save, preview or upload it. And you have to preview it before you can post your story so that story size and headline length can be checked.

You can work directly into the form, or write your story in a text or word document first and copy/paste it into the form. It’s worth doing this, or at least saving the draft in sweeble as you go along, that way if it takes you a while to get right what you want to say, you haven't lost everything if the network falls down, the page times out, or you click 'quit' by mistake.

I've never written a news story before, any pointers?

You'll find the toughest bits will be writing a headline only 40 characters (letters) long and writing your first (opening) paragraph within 30 words. These restrictions are to make it easier for people to browse through the stories on the story lists.

You will find it helps to just write your story in the box marked 'Body' and then cut and paste the first paragraph of it into the 'First paragraph' box, rather than try and write into one box at a time.

More writing tips you might find useful are to make sure your first paragraph is interesting enough to tease readers into clicking on your story in a list — but not by just writing exciting words that have nothing to do with the story you're writing!

Ask yourself: "What is my story about? What is the main point I want to get over to other people?" Don't waste space with descriptions and formal sentences, keep it simple and clear and to the point.

There are more pointers on good news writing on the sweeble blog, here.

Same applies to the headline, but you will also find it useful to miss out prepositions (things like the, and, a, they) to keep the character count low — as long as it still makes sense!

If it's really important to your story that you stay anonymous — maybe it's to do with the company you work for, or someone close to you — then avoid putting anything in that could identify you. Things like place names, dates things happened, school or company names, or nicknames people who know you would recognise.

And remember, if it’s a difficult story and you would like a journalist to look over what you’ve got and give you some help, contact us.

Relax, and use your common sense. Stories written in anger, instant reactions to what someone has said or done, these are the danger points. Think about what it is you want to achieve: Is it to pass on your experience as a warning to others; or share information about something you’ve seen; or let the world know how you feel about something that’s happened?

If what you want is to cause pain to someone who hurt you; to encourage other people to react in a negative way; to make someone look stupid; or to cause trouble for a person or business – you’re on thin ice. And if you think that hiding behind the anonymity sweeble offers means you can be offensive, or nasty, or bloody-minded – you’re wrong and we’ll make sure you know it.

The law of defamation (UK) basically exists to protect an individual’s reputation (professional and moral) without preventing journalists exposing wrongdoing. Defamation becomes libel when the accusation or statement is published or broadcast (including on the web).

The defence against defamation/libel is truth, ie that what was published is the truth and, crucially, you can prove it's true.

Losing a libel case that has got to court means you could be sued for damages, and the amount decided by a jury, plus the costs of the court case. However, the reality is that most libel cases are brought against media businesses (newspapers, TV), not individuals, and never get to court because the story is pulled before being published, or an apology is published after the event.

You also need to be careful if you’re writing about a court case that hasn’t finished, or ongoing police action – this could come under the Contempt of Court Act.

If you're really worried your story might give you problems legally, contact us and we'll get an editor to look it over.

How do I know if my story has been published?

When you click ‘Preview story’ or ‘Upload story’, if the page doesn’t change and your story is still sitting on your screen, it means there's something you've got wrong.

Have a look at whether it says something below any of the boxes, for instance 'Please choose a category' or 'Headline must be 40 characters', and make the adjustment. You will need to preview (or Save draft) again and you won't be able to actually publish (upload) your story until everything's okay.

Can I add pictures, sound or video clips to my story?

Yes. If you want to add pictures (or sound or video) to a story — or even post a picture with just a few lines of comment — select click on ‘Picture' (or Video’ or ‘Audio’) under ‘Add/edit media’ within the story edit/create page.

The picture or media needs to be already on the computer you're using, or on removable storage in that machine, for you to be able to browse and find it and add it to your story.

Once you've added it, select 'Upload media' and the Add media file page will change to show your picture and message near the top of the page saying 'Added a media file to your story'.

To see how it looks live, go back to ‘My Sweeble’ and ‘View’ the story from your story list, or go and look at the story on the website in the story category, Top 100, Latest stories, video playlist or other places your story or video would appear.

If you want to add a video with just a title and explanation rather than a background story, select ‘Post video’ from the homepage navigation bar to bring up the short form page for posting videos.

Sweeble uses a Flash-player based system to convert videos from most formats, including videos taken on mobile phones, Quicktime, MPEG4, MP4, 3GP, WMV and AVI.

Sweeble accepts file sizes up to 50MB. Obviously the bigger the file you’re trying to upload, the longer it will take, especially over a slow connection.

Can I see all of the stories I've posted?

Yes. Click on the My Sweeble link from the menu box or nav bar. This takes you to lists of stories, bookmarks, adverts that you’ve posted.

You can edit or delete material, finish draft stories, or post new stories. You can go into a story and delete unwanted comments. You can edit or extend your user profile or change your password.

If you have lots of stories, you can view them by most recent (the preset) or by story categories.

I've got an idea for the site, can I tell you about it?

Absolutely, this is still just the beta development version of sweeble. There's a lot still being worked on right now and any comments you've got for how things might be improved in future versions, email us via 'Contact Sweeble'.

What’s this sweebstar thing about?

It’s a system to rank the quality and reliability of sweeblers in terms of the stories or videos they post – sweeblers are rated by people reading or viewing their posts and by how popular their material is. The system also registers the trustworthiness of sweeblers selling or swapping stuff in the marketplace.

You can’t vote for yourself or your own story, video or ad and there are limits on how other people vote for you to keep the system fair. For information on how it works, click here.