A Guide to Island Zero

Welcome to Island Zero. On the site, there is no form of registration, logging on, or membership needed in order to post. Not only is it an interesting concept, but it places the importance on the content of the poster rather than the poster themselves. Posters within Island Zero are encouraged to not to use personal tags, nicknames, or signatures.

Categories and topics are seperated into specific boards. These boards guide discussions and usually create their own community within the site, and it is recommended (but not required) to lurk in order to get a general feel for each one. Each board also has their own set of rules.
If you see that a board is lacking, or you would like to contribute, creating a thread is only a click away!

A list of our current boards can be found here.

Introduction

In the form to create threads and posts, there are important components that aren't apparent the first time.

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Names, Tripcodes, and Secure Tripcodes

While it is encouraged to leave the "Name" field blank in most instances, inserting any name in the field will display said name when your post is created. Since other users are able to do the same thing, tripcodes serve as a unique identity in the rare instances it's necessary to establish one.

To generate a name with a tripcode, use a pound symbol, "#", after your name and insert a passphrase.
For example, "Anonymous#myCoolTripCode!" will always return "Anonymous !cENvZGUh".

Since normal tripcodes only use passwords, they can be cracked. However, with a secure tripcode, the only difference is that it is entirely unique to you, and the passphrase cannot be cracked. To create a secure tripcode, add an extra pound symbol, so you would input "Anonymous##myCoolTripCode!" and in one instance it would return "Anonymous !!jwuGEeQe".

You may use the tripcode alone, or a name alongside the tripcode, by typing the name before the pound symbol(s).

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Subject

This is where your thread title will go. To ensure thread quality and more users coming to your thread, it is recommended to include tags and a write descriptive message. At best, these should be good guidelines to get started; feel free to experiment and mess around with them.

Examples
Below are good and bad examples of thread subjects.
Tags
Tags are written using square brackets, [tag], and can be anything. You are free to essentially 'invent' tags at your leisure, especially when a board doesn't have existing tags in use.

It's good practice to adhere to the form of recurring, popular, tags, so as to not have various spellings or forms of the same things. For example, [star wars] should not have variations such as [starwars], [star-wars], [sw], or similar. Tags are otherwise case insensitive.

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Options

These are options that can be typed in the Options field when posting a thread or reply.

Sage
下げ [さげ], [sa̠ɡe̞ɾɯ̟], is a Japanese verb meaning "to lower". Pronounced /sɑɡɛ/ and sometimes /seɪdʒ/ in English, this is a way to post in a thread without bumping it to the top of the board. "Sage'ing" a thread is effectively a form of user moderation, since saged threads will fall to the bottom and become pruned while the popular and good threads stay up at the top.

Noko
By default, you are redirected to your thread after creating one, so "noko" is an option to block this, keeping you at the board index.

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Post contents

Refrain from posting about current events and politics. This isn't a news aggregator website, and there are plenty of other platforms to post and discuss these things. If you wish to talk about news, politics, and current events, that do not pertain to the interests/hobbies that Island Zero facilitates discussions about, kindly "f off" to Reddit or Twitter/X.
This is a global rule, and violating it is a bannable offense.

Media links
When posting links to various media, try to prune excessive portions of the url, in order to keep the links nice and short, and also help the rich embedding thereof. Various platforms these days use unique identifiers when you use their 'sharing' feature, which track the use of the link, and sometimes contain user information. While it's not a rule, we do encourage you to try not to post using these.

Text Formatting
There are three options for formatting your threads and posts: plain text, ASCII and SJIS art. These options can be selected while you are creating a post or a thread, and will responsively change. This can help give you a preview of your art before you post it. The textarea can be expanded to give you a better preview.

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Verification

Our verification consists of a CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") system, that the user needs to go through in order to post. The CAPTCHA consists of a random selection of intentionally distorted letters and numbers. Simply type these out into the field that says "Type Captcha here" and press Post. If completed correctly, your post will go through. If not, you'll be prompted to try again.

This system is to prevent automated spam bots from posting, and flooding the boards with automated/generated posts. If you see posts of this nature, or manually (by humans) submitted spam posts, make sure to report them.