What kinds of questions can I ask?

Any question about spirituality, reality creation, metaphysics, mind power, human consciousness etc is welcome.

If you have questions about Inward Quest itself, please do not post them here as they would clutter up the website and make it difficult for people to find what they are looking for. Instead, please join our Inward Quest User Forum at http://groups.google.com/group/inward-quest-discussions

Please make your question detailed and specific and written clearly and simply.

When you ask a question, the software will automatically show you a list of similar questions. Please take a moment to see if someone else has asked (or even answered) the same question before posting your own. If you do end up posting a duplicate question, that is ok. Other people will probably add a comment to your question that points you, and other readers, to the earlier question just to be helpful.

It's also ok to answer your own question, even if you had an answer in mind before posting it, but just remember to phrase it in the form of a question.

What kinds of answers should I be giving here?

Be Courteous and Respectful

Treat others with the same respect you'd want them to show you. When answering questions, only make statements you can back up with an appropriate reference, or give personal experiences. Please be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know.

Be Honest

Vote misinformation down (make sure you leave a comment saying exactly what is incorrect and make sure to give a reference). If you have the reputation, edit the answer! If not, provide a better answer of your own!

Be Open-Minded

When it comes to matters involving the human mind there is usually no "right" answer. At times there can be opposing theories and strategies that are both appropriate for different people. It is okay to disagree with someone as long as both sides are providing their own facts (references to other material and personal experiences) and avoiding opinions and personal attacks.

What kinds of questions should I not ask here?

Don't ask questions that lead to arguments, heated discussions, or opinionated answers. Remember that most people who view this site will have typed a question into Google, are brought directly to one of these pages, and they just want an answer. There are lots of forums out there, but this is not a forum. Although we realize that many topics associated with spirituality and belief carry some controversy, always be courteous and respectful.

You can help to police the community by voting up helpful questions and answers or flagging inappropriate ones (requires 15 reputation), voting unhelpful posts down (100 reputation), vote to close a question (3000 reputation), and even delete closed questions (10,000 reputation).

Reputation? What's that?

You can ask and answer questions on InwardQuest.com without ever worrying about reputation, but...

InwardQuest.com is run by you! If you want to help run and improve this site, you'll need reputation first. Reputation is kind of like how much the InwardQuest.com community trusts you. There is no mechanism in the software for administrators or moderators to "give" anyone reputation. Reputation is earned by convincing other readers that you know what you're talking about.

It works like this: Let's say you ask a good question, or provide a helpful answer. Other people will vote it up: you earn 10 reputation. If someone asks an off-topic question or posts an incorrect or unhelpful answer, other people vote them down: lose 2 reputation. Reputation earning is capped at 200 per day (having one of your answers chosen as the accepted answer is immune to this cap).

As you collect reputation, InwardQuest.com gives you more tools to help build the content on this site:

15	Vote up
15	Flag offensive
50	Leave comments
100	Vote down (costs 1 reputation), edit community wiki questions
250	Vote to close or reopen your questions, create new tags
500	Retag questions
2000	Edit other people's questions and answers
3000	Vote to close or reopen any questions
10,000	Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools

At the high end of this reputation spectrum, there is little difference between users with high reputation and the site moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run Inward Quest - you do.

Other people can edit my questions and answers?

They certainly can! InwardQuest.com isn't a discussion board or a blog. It's more like Wikipedia. Just like Wikipedia, most people who arrive here will have typed their question into a search engine. We need a way to keep the quality of the questions and answers high, and that means giving the most trusted members of the community the ability to merge questions, add up-to-date relevant information, or even just fix nagging typos and punctuation.

What is all this voting about?

Any registered user who gains 15 reputation points is entitled to start voting on the site.

You can think of voting as a kind of money. You give votes to people who you think have asked good questions or written good answers - it is a reward for taking part in the site. The more votes that someone receives, the higher their reputation score becomes. You place an "up vote" by clicking the small up-arrow next to each question or answer.

You can vote up to 20 times daily and we encourage you to use your votes. Inward Quest is run by you and, through the voting system, you can decide which questions and answers become more visible on the site, and which users gain more powers to influence how the site runs.

You can also "down vote" questions or answers if you think they are unhelpful or simply wrong (in your view) - however, it will cost you one of your own reputation points to do so, and the other person will lose two reputation points.

Please note that we monitor voting patterns so please don't try voting for your duplicate accounts or your friends - we will notice! Honest voting helps to make the site more valuable to others.

What is a community wiki?

When you ask a question, you have the option of making it a community wiki. Moderators also have the ability to force some questions to become a community wiki.

This is most useful for questions that are more like polls or lists. For instance, suppose your question is Who is the best spiritual teacher? This question is on topic but there is no "right" answer. It makes more sense for everyone to contribute an item they found useful, and have the rest of the community vote those items up or down. Then the original question, or a designated answer (the accepted answer) can be edited to hold an ongoing list of the most useful items.

You only need 100 reputation to edit a community wiki, so a large proportion of the community can contribute.

Normally questions like these are very popular, and people vote a lot on all the answers they like, or even answers they find humorous. This would give people an incentive to only ask or answer "poll-like" questions because you could earn enormous reputation very quickly. To prevent this, community wiki posts have no effect on reputation.

What are "tags"?

Think of tags as question categories. When you ask a question, you have to provide at least one tag for that question. Tags allow us to categorize questions (and show related questions) without forcing the categories into a hierarchy. You can tag one question law-of-attraction and metaphysics, another question spirituality and mind-power, and a third question books and reviews. You can then choose to ignore certain tags, like metaphysics, but mark other tags as interesting, like reviews. In that case the site will start to show you more review questions and less metaphysics questions.

What if I'm not satisfied with the answers? (What's a bounty?)

First try editing your question, including documenting your own efforts at finding an answer.

Questions that are older than two days and don't have an accepted answer are eligible for a bounty. You can offer from 50 to 500 of your own reputation as a reward, and InwardQuest.com adds in another 50 reputation. Questions with a bounty are highlighted visually and they appear on the featured questions tab.

The bounty period lasts seven days. When you accept an answer, the author of that answer receives the bounty immediately, and this is permanent. If you don't accept an answer in 7 days, then the highest voted answer is automatically selected (but they only get half the bounty reward). Once you setup a question with a bounty, you can't get the reputation back.

Of course, bounty awards, like all accepted answers, are immune to the daily reputation cap (200 points daily maximum) and community wiki mode.

Who owns the copyright for the information on InwardQuest.com?

The site design and the logo is copyrighted by PsiTek., but the content (i.e. the questions and answers) is copyrighted by each individual contributor. All of the content is licensed under the creative commons attribution-share alike license which is the same license that Wikipedia uses. When someone asks a new question they are implicitly releasing the text of their question under that license, and anyone who adds to that work by editing it, or answering the question, are creating a derived work that must also be licensed under that same license. That is why we say that the content of this site is owned by the community.

How can I find out more information about InwardQuest.com?

Please join our Inward Quest User Forum at http://groups.google.com/group/inward-quest-discussions and you can ask for more information there.