Let’s see now:

1. the knowledge fundamentals for fluthering and establishing relationships – be yourself – the rest will follow.
2. What is all the lurve competition about? Much ado…
3. What is an NSFW? Not safe for work
4. What is all this about mansions? ...about nothing
5. What is it about being modded and kicked out; it seems to me there are a few who have a very short and blunt vocabulary and not all that humorous. Yep.
6. Is fluther party about the community getting all happy fingered about adding lurve to someone they want to help out? Pretty much.
7. Would you say fluthering is more about social networking, actual knowledge gain, understanding where others are coming from or what? Yes.

You’re all set.

1. the knowledge fundamentals for fluthering and establishing relationships The best way to establish relationships here is to just be here and participate. As you participate more often, you will get to know more of the jellies and develop relationships.
2. What is all the lurve competition about? It’s not really a competition. You get lurve for coming to Fluther 2 days in a row, for getting great answers and great questions, and for having people follow you. The best way to get your lurve score to grow is to be as active as you can.
3. What is an NSFW? It stands for Not Safe For Work, but it’s used as a warning to people that what they are about to view may not be appropriate for some work situations and it also warns those of us with children around that we might want to make sure they aren’t looking at the screen when we go into the question.
4. What is all this about mansions? You’ll catch on to this as you stick around for a while. It’s just something that’s been around for a long time and stuck around.
5. What is it about being modded and kicked out; it seems to me there are a few who have a very short and blunt vocabulary and not all that humorous. Fluther has specific guidelines that should be followed. Failure to follow the guidelines can lead to your post being modded (removed by the moderators of the site). As far as being kicked out, that is rare and only happens to users who continue to disregard the guidelines or who just can’t seem to get what Fluther is all about.
6. Is fluther party about the community getting all happy fingered about adding lurve to someone they want to help out? It’s really about just having fun with other users, the lurve is just a bonus.
7. Would you say fluthering is more about social networking, actual knowledge gain, understanding where others are coming from or what? *I honestly don’t see Fluther as a social networking site, but many others do. To me, it is, and always will be a Q&A site that I come to with hopes of helping others and learning new things.

Best thing you can do to really get familiar with Fluther is to stick around and be active. Explore some of the older questions too because some of them explain a lot about things around here.

Fluther is about asking and answering questions.

That is its main purpose.

That is how you form relationships. You participate in answering questions and interact with others.

Lurve is a meaningless thing in the grand scheme of things. All it denotes is a good answer (5 points) or a good question (3 points). You are limited in the amount of lurve you give to another jelly (100 points).

The mansion is an imaginary place where you gain access after you reach 10,000 points. The parties that are thrown are to congratulate jellies who have reached point plateaus at the 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, etc. point level.

Ahoy and avast there, matey! Welcome aboard! Pull up a keg to sit on and grab a flagon of your favorite beverage.

1. the knowledge fundamentals for fluthering and establishing relationships? Let the fair sea winds fill the sails of your questions and swab the decks till they shine with your answers. That’ll be the best way to make mates ‘round these parts.
2. What is all the lurve competition about? Land a goshen! It’s now competition. It’s just for fun. There’s 5 poiints for a great answer and 3 points for a great question, and a single member can only give another member roughly 100 points.
3. What is an NSFW? Hehehe! Them’s the questions you don’t look at while you’re a workin’. Hehehe. Nudge nudge. Know what I mean?
4. What is all this about mansions? They for parties! Whoopee! Show us some lurve!
5. What is it about being modded and kicked out; it seems to me there are a few who have a very short and blunt vocabulary and not all that humorous. Well, gosh darn it. You can’t expect everyone to be all sweet and chummy cooped up in this little ship, can you? Sailors swear, and it’s a right, too. It’s only when they start callin’ names and throwin’ punches below the belt that the mods get called in and set things straight. Watch yer spellin’ now. Them there mods hates a bad speller.
6. Is fluther party about the community getting all happy fingered about adding lurve to someone they want to help out? Parties are for lettin’ down yer hair and cuttin’ loose on the rug. Share music! Toot a horn!
7. Would you say fluthering is more about social networking, actual knowledge gain, understanding where others are coming from or what? Fluther is fer makin’ what you want to make of it, m’dear.

Welcome aboard! Oh, I said that. Well, Have another root beer on me.

1. Choose questions that interest you and answer them. You can answer with brevity or length. If it is a social question, you can also answer it with humor.

Relationships will come. Just keep writing and eventually someone will be interested enough to pm (private message) you. Or you might be interested in someone else. PM them. Most people are pretty friendly. I’m probably an exception, but that’s not because I’m unfriendly—I just seem that way. I’m either intense or nothing. There is no inbetween. That’s not to a lot of people’s taste, but fortunately for me, there are enough who can deal with it that I’m not isolated.

2. There is no lurve competition. It’s just that if you answer questions in a way people like, they can give you lurve. It’s silliness. It is something of a barometer of how well a person writes answers that people like, but you have to adjust it for time spent here if you were going to make it into a meaningful competition. I think it keeps some people interested, but really, the only interesting thing around here are the questions and the people who write them and who write answers.

3. I’m sure others have told you.

4. For some reason, we started holding congratulations questions when people reached 10, 20, 30,, and 40 k. These levels were euphemistically termed entering a mansion. But only 10K is a mansion. I forget what 20k is, but 30 K is an island and 40K is an artists colony. If I have anything to say about it (and I may) there will be no 50K metaphorical place. If forced to create one, I think I will put it in some dark, dank, smelly pit where there is no sunlight. No one will want to go there and they will all delete their accounts and start over. I told you I’m not a very good people person. Or was that another question? Well, I’ll tell you, I have a weird sense of humor.

Under the orange tree!

5. Some people annoy the shit out of others. The others complain to the mods, and the mods, when sufficiently tired of the complaints, kick those annoying people off. The mods also try to keep answers up to certain standards which you can read about at tiresome length elsewhere. Suffice to say if you are reasonably nice and polite and you know how to spell and put in paragraph breaks, you won’t get modded very much.

6. Not sure what a fluther party is. Probably some kind of silliness that generally seems to be a waste of time to me. Then again, I don’t tolerate fluff very well. Perhaps I’m antisocial most of the time. I never went to a party in high school, except for band parties. If I weren’t in the band, no one would have invited me. Since they probably don’t send out invitations to fluther parties, I must be missing them. Either that, or I don’t recognize them when I see them. In other words: not my idea of fun.

7. Now that’s a very interesting question, and I wish you would ask it. If you do, I’ll give you my opinion there. I’ve written too much here already, which means you won’t read it and I’m doing it for my own good, and that you’ll never ask the question because you will have given up on me long ago. Typical. But fuck it. I like to think aloud even if no one can hear me thinking. Which is likely, because I’m not telepathic and am not likely to become so.

Now, I can really kind of go crazy because no one will be reading my words by now. It kind of amuses me to do so. I might randomly start turning to other ridiculous issues, like shoeflies. And shoe laces. And shoe horns.

I have this think about shoes. All my life, whenever a random word is called for, “shoe” is the first word that enters my mind. Why? I really don’t know. Maybe it’s the sound of it. Maybe it’s something about the concept. Or that it is kind of peripheral to most other subjects. Yet, as a random word, “shoe” is mine. Which, of course, makes it no longer random.

Sometimes I like to put it next to another word that doesn’t quite make sense. Shoe potato. Shoe eel. Shoe referendum. Maybe it’s a way of seeing what the fuck is going on inside the recesses of my mind. Although why I would be obsessed with shoes, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not obsessed with shoes. Just the word. My shoes are really old and worn and I have two pair—one is tan and the other black. They are rockports and they are sneakers that I wear to work because they almost look like real shoes and I work in a place where no one cares.

I could go on and on like this, riffing from one banal thought to another in vague hopes that someone would find it funny. At least I entertain myself, if no one else. Which gets me back to my first point: fluther is just for your own amusement. Use it with care.

@wundayatta : I’m going to use your own shoes to kick you in the ass to answer #7. The question was asked here. It doesn’t have to be repeated somewhere else to get an answer. At least, one person was reading your tome and wanted an answer.

It’s just all about the love for me…being able to connect with people of like minds… I know others have answered your specific questions so I just thought I’d give you my brief perspective…

One thing no one above has explained is what a “great answer” is in relation to lurve points. Beneath each post is a link that says “Great Answer” with a number next to it. When you click that link beneath someone’s post, the number increases by one. That’s a counter that says how many people have clicked it.

If you are one of the first five to click it—AND you haven’t already awarded twenty GA’s to that same person—you will increase that person’s “lurve” score by 5 points. After you have reached the maximum of 100 points per person, your GA clicks will still be counted, but they don’t add to the person’s score.

The same goes for GA’s coming your way.

People have their own criteria for when they click GA. If you want to thank someone for answering your question or applaud someone else’s answer, that’s a way to do it.

For “Great Questions,” the points increase by 3 for you, again just for the first 5 you get per question, when someone clicks the “Great Question” link in the question details box. And you can do the same for others.

It’s like the transvestite said on the sabbath, “eat, drink & be Mary!”

I too came to Fluther through a different portal. Wasn’t even looking for this kind of a site, but then I ended up on here and I’ve found it to be a very unique place.

It is certainly, foremost, a Q & A site, but it seems to be better than most, simply because of the way it is set up, in that you can get very immediate feedback, whereas some of the other sites kind of give you random answers or don’t answer the question completely, or you only get one answer.

With Fluther you may get 100 completely different answers for the same question, or you might get 99 answers that are almost identical, with slight nuances (that’s usually because the question has a pretty obvious answer that the questioner, called an OP for “original poster” just didn’t want to hear) Othertimes you will get some similar answers from about half the people, and the other half are completely all over the map (that’s usually with the religious and political questions).

As a group, most Flutherers are more left leaning, more liberal, and more agnostic or atheistic than your average group of folks. Not sure why this is, maybe it’s just the old adage of birds of a feather flocking together. But no one is discouraged from coming on Fluther, even if their views are not similar to the majority of members. We try to be open minded, and we try to allow all sorts of viewpoints, and we try not to purposely hurt people’s feelings or offend people. But sometimes it happens (from any perspective). What is not tolerated are explicit attacks on other members and I have a pretty good feeling that if you came on here and advocated for cannibalism or mandatory sterilization for all females, then you might get booted off by the moderators (the mods as we call them) or those types of people may end up saying something in a way that violates the standards of Fluther (which are fairly well documented in the “guidelines” section that you should read before you start participating.

On the other hand, Fluther is the perfect place to have a non-violent discussion about cannibalism and the possibility of mandatory sterilization for all females.

The NSFW designation (which you should use when discussing something of a sexual nature) is put on there, so if a question pops up when you are at work, it is a warning to you, not to look at it at work, because you can get fired for looking at sexual content at most places of business. Not Suitable For Work. There are all sorts of other icky kinds of topics that can be talked about without the NSFW designation, but anything that has to do with sex or sexual organs should get the NSFW designation. It’s also a nice gesture for Flutherers to put some sort of warning in their questions if they’re going to talk about disgusting sounding things that might make people’s tummies get upset (like poop and boogers and boils and insect guts etc.) just so that the squeamish can avoid looking at the question, or at least prepare themselves, mentally, before looking.

I don’t think Fluther was set up as a social networking kind of site, and it really doesn’t work like those kinds of sites. But it is indeed very social. That just happens because after you posted questions and gotten answers and answered questions and read other people’s answers, you will find that you have lots of things in common with some of the Jellies (another word for Flutherers or Members of Fluther). You also might learn a bunch of neat stuff that you never even thought about or considered before and that’s how you end up developing relationships with other Jellies. Also, after you read tons and tons of questions and answers, you get to know what kinds of personalities some of the Jellies have (some more than others, some more obvious than others) and you get to know what kinds of subjects everyone is interested in. Some people may seem like people you want to get to know better and some people you may want to avoid. If you want to get some specific information from any particular Jelly, you can certainly have the discussion with them right on the page with a question you were looking at, or you can click on any Jelly’s avatar and their profile will come up. Then you can PM (private message) them directly and wait for an answer. If you PM someone, you will see that there is a little box that is next to the button for sending your message that asks if you want your PM to be private (only seen by the Jelly you were sending the message to) or if you don’t mind, uncheck that box, and your PM can be seen by anyone who looks at that Jelly’s profile. I would guess that most PM’s are totally private, but some, especially when you are just discussing the facts of a recipe or where to buy something or how to build something, then having the PM available for everyone to look at can be useful.

I PM back and forth with a number of Jellies, but other Jellies take it a step further and invite them to go onto their Facebook accounts. I tend not to do that, because for me, the anonymity that Fluther provides, makes it much easier for me to be 100% honest and truthful with my answers, whereas I’d feel self conscious if anyone knew who I was in real life. I’m shy, so for me that would be an obstacle that I don’t want to have to overcome. So the Jellies on Fluther know me, but they don’t know who I am in real life and that’s OK for some of us, and others need and want to be known in their real lives too. Some of the Jellies have even met each other, which is pretty cool.

Thankfully there are 2 sections of Fluther. One that is General and one that is Social. The general section is there to simply get an answer, with no nonsense. The social side is where you can still get a very good straight answer, but you can also converse on a personal level with people and bring up other related or non-related topics on the same subject. And sometimes, we all get a little silly, and the social side is where we are allowed to do that, as long as we continue to follow the Fluther guidelines. Both the general and social sides can bring about extremely creative, well thought out, heartfelt and compassionate answers. You just can’t go off topic on the General side.

If you stick around for awhile, you will find out that there are a lot of really funny, really smart, really creative people on Fluther. Not every day and not always at the same time, but if you stick around you will experience profundity, and at times you will be brought to tears (either from laughter or from deep understanding and sorrow for shared experiences, or simply from compassion) Other times you will want to reach through the screen and throttle some of the Jellies for posting insensitive or mean-sounding answers. Some of that stuff gets modded off, if the poster violates the Fluther guidelines, but some of the stuff that sounds mean to one person, is the God’s honest truth to another person, so unless there is a specific attack or a violation of the guidelines, most of that stuff is allowed to be said and stays on the site.

Occasionally we get trolls, which you probably know are people that create “fake” or “multiple” accounts for the purpose of asking naughty questions, using bad language, making horrific statements against people, spamming or simply trying to gain negative attention towards themselves. It’s up to all of us to try to week those people out. The mods have a pretty good idea of who is a troll and who is not. If you’re not sure, but suspect that someone is a troll, you can and should Flag their question or response and then give a brief description to the mods as to why you think the person is a troll. This help the mods, who can’t read every single question or response.

The business with the mansions is simply a fun and silly thing that has been made up by all of us. A fictional place where we all get to go to when we’ve reached a certain amount of lurve (points for good Q’s and A’s and for sticking around and being helpful). Usually, by the time someone has gained enough lurve to “enter the mansion” as we say, we throw them a pretend virtual party and we try to let them know how much we appreciate them. Usually by then, you will know them well enough by what they have said, that you can give them “pretend” gifts and design “pretend” physical features to the “pretend” mansion that you think they will like. It’s all in fun, kind of like a roast, but not in a mean way, it’s meant to show the person how much you appreciate them, and we usually give examples.

There are also a lot of silly terms that get thrown around, for example frizzer and under the orange tree or The Yarnpocolypse that simply have to do with something one of the Jellies said at one time or another that a bunch of people thought was really funny and then those terms become part of the lexicon. It is considered a very high honor to get one of your terms immortalized into the Fluther lexicon. That hasn’t happened to me yet, only in my Frantasies!

Welcome : )

Other things that might interest you. There are awards too. Little quests you can go on to get the Cake in the Frizzer award and many others. People may follow you and you may follow them. If you follow someone and they post questions, I think this means you are likely to be invited to answer their questions.

Enjoy!

@hawaii_jake You know as well as I do that if you ask seven questions in one, most of them won’t get much attention. I haven’t noticed many people taking on number 7, either. You’re also the only fool who actually read my whole thing, so we know that answering that question would be an exercise in futility. While I do write crap for myself, I still hope someone else might read it. Or maybe a few someones else.

Fluther for me is a perfect opportunity to challenge your belief systems.

What a truly excellent question.

1. the knowledge fundamentals for fluthering and establishing relationships
It helps if you can read and write Standard English, or make yourself minimally understood otherwise. You seem to have gotten this okay.

Paragraph breaks in long text runs are always appreciated.

2. What is all the lurve competition about?
It’s only a competition if you think of it that way. Don’t think of it that way. You win. See how easy?

3. What is an NSFW?
Not Something For Wimps

4. What is all this about mansions?
It’s a trick and a trap. Avoid them at all costs! (The mansions have dungeons, you know.)

5. What is it about being modded and kicked out; it seems to me there are a few who have a very short and blunt vocabulary and not all that humorous.
Personal attacks are a good way to get kicked out. Posting anything humorous in General will really fire up the Modstapo. (Be sure to pair that with a nominal answer, and you’re generally okay.) Try to stay on topic. Smile at the mods. Who says I’m not fucking humorous? I’ll lay out that lying bastard.

6. Is fluther party about the community getting all happy fingered about adding lurve to someone they want to help out?
“Party?” or “partly?” I’m going with an assumption that you meant “partly”. We never party here. Unless someone brings a cake out of the frizzer. Or waffles. Or pancakes. I’m getting hot thinking about getting happy-fingered. Don’t mind me.

7. Would you say fluthering is more about social networking, actual knowledge gain, understanding where others are coming from or what?
Fluther is what the jellies make of it. I’ve been working my fingers to the bone here trying to make something decent and wholesome… you see what I have to work with. Tag, you’re it. Your turn to try. Good fecking luck.

@wundayatta In number seven, you wrote I have this think about shoes. Did you mean “thing”?

Ask, answer, be nice (and if you can’t be nice, at least be civil), write well. Oh, and read the guidelines. That’s about it, really. Enjoy!

What she ^^^^ says. She’s our Mom and we love and fear her.

If I ever have my own forum or a site like this one, my only rule will be, don’t be a dick.
But yeah, some kick ass answers right here.

In my opinion, Fluther is about getting answers to serious questions you may have, being silly and releasing stress on goofy questions you may have, and meeting some truly fantastic people in the process. Don’t worry about the lurve, it’s just for fun.

@WillWorkForChocolate Agreed one forty twelve thousand percent, ya. :)

@Symbeline I are so smart, yeah?

@WillWorkForChocolate : Yups, you iz.

I don’t know, I just come here for the nekked pancake parties.

@WillWorkForChocolate Daaaang straight, mang!