Frequently Asked Questions / User Guide
This is some basic information about Inward Quest.
You will be treated here as though you have read and understood this information (even if you haven't) so we advise you to spend a few minutes reading it now. Your continued participation in Inward Quest means that you agree to what is written here.
What is Inward Quest?
Inward Quest is a free-to-use website featuring a vast number of questions and answers on spiritual and metaphysical topics.
While it may initially appear to be similar to a typical internet discussion forum or chat group, it really isn't like them at all. It's actually more like Wikipedia.
If you are looking to chat or hold general discussions with other spiritually-minded people, join our Inward Quest Community.
But if instead you are looking for direct and specific answers to your spiritually-related questions, or are looking to share your own accumulated knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of others, you will find Inward Quest to be an inspiring and uplifting place to exchange information.
You can find out more about Inward Quest here
What kinds of questions can I ask?
Any question about spirituality, reality creation, metaphysics, mind power, human consciousness etc is welcome.
You can get an idea of what is discussed on Inward Quest by taking a look at some of the best questions and answers so far
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 the Inward Quest Community
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.
Ask One Question At A Time
Do not bundle up multiple questions within one Inward Quest "question". Ask your bundle of questions as individual, separate questions otherwise people will not know what your main point is and you may not receive the specific answers you are looking for
Make Your Questions Detailed And Specific
Please make your question detailed and specific, and written clearly and simply. You will find that the more care and effort you put into asking your question, the better your answers will be.
Put enough detail in the body of each question so that others can be certain what your question is about. The more detail you put into the body of a question, the more it suggests to others that you are serious about wanting a detailed answer. As a result, others will probably go to the trouble of providing you with those detailed and specific answers.
For example, simply writing "I need to manifest more money right now" in the body of a question is not likely to be taken as seriously as several paragraphs explaining your background, current circumstances and listing what money-generating methods you have already tried.
Brief, one-line questions with little or no explanation or background as to what the question is about are likely to be closed.
What kinds of answers should I be giving here?
Be Courteous and Respectful
Treat others with the same respect that you'd want them to show you. Please be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know.
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 avoiding personal attacks.
If you find that you strongly disagree with another's viewpoint, it is up to you to express your own viewpoint more eloquently and persuasively than the other person. If instead you resort to confrontation and verbal violence towards others, we will suspend your account without further warning. We don't care what your viewpoint is (everyone's point of view is welcome here) but we do care how you say it. Disruptive behaviour is of no value to anyone here and simply suggests to us that you've run out of anything worthwhile to say.
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 karma points) and voting unhelpful posts down (requires 100 karma)
Karma points? What's that?
You can ask and answer questions on InwardQuest.com without ever worrying about karma points, but...
InwardQuest.com is run by you! If you want to help run and improve this site, you'll need karma points first. Karma is kind of like how much the InwardQuest.com community trusts you. Karma points are 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 karma. If someone asks an off-topic question or posts an incorrect or unhelpful answer, other people vote them down: lose 2 karma. Karma 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 karma points, InwardQuest.com gives you more tools to help build the content on this site:
| 15 | Vote up other people's answers |
| 100 | Vote down (costs 1 karma) |
| 500 | Retag questions, edit community wiki questions |
| 750 | Create new tags |
| 2,000 | Edit other people's questions and answers |
| 3,000 | Convert answers into comments and new questions |
This is only a sample of what's available. You will find more and more of Inward Quest's features become available to you as your points increase
At the high end of this karma points spectrum, there is little difference between users with high karma 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 add up-to-date relevant information, or even just fix nagging typos and punctuation.
If you have gained more than 2,000 karma points then you have earned the right to help run the website by editing questions and answers, and we encourage you to do so. If you spot spelling or grammar mistakes or even formatting problems, please feel free to go ahead and correct them. But also be very careful not to alter the meaning of anything that someone has written. As a general rule, if you are not sure what you are doing then don't do anything. If there is an obvious problem, a site moderator will fix it eventually anyway, or you can just report it for their attention as described below
If you notice a problem with a question or answer, you can flag it for the attention of the site moderators by clicking the report link found at the bottom of every question and answer. Doing this also helps us deal quickly with spam or offensive comments.
What is all this voting about?
Any registered user who gains 15 karma points is entitled to start voting on the site.
You can think of voting as a kind of money but it's money that costs you nothing to give to someone else (since you get 30 free votes a day to use). 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 karma score becomes. You place an "up vote" by clicking the small up-arrow next to each question or answer.
You can vote up to 30 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. This means that your votes help make the site more useful for everyone who visits in future.
How you use your up-votes is private to you, and only you. Other users cannot see who you have been up-voting for.
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 karma points to do so, and the other person will lose two karma points.
Because of the one point deduction for casting a "down vote", it is possible for another user to work out who down-voted them by looking at your karma points history (for non-community wiki posts) so please don't assume that "down votes" are anonymous.
It is up to you how you use your votes but we have found that most users of Inward Quest use up-votes only and simply ignore questions/answers they don't like instead of down-voting them.
Please note that, although other users cannot see any of your up-votes, the site moderators do monitor voting patterns to prevent fraudulent voting, so please don't try voting for your friends - we will notice! Honest voting helps to make the site more valuable to others.
Finally, you can also upvote comments that people have made to existing answers but these upvotes have no effect on karma points - they are used just as a way of highlighting valuable comments
What is a Community Wiki?
When you ask a question (or write an answer), you have the option of making it a Community Wiki. Moderators and members with high karma also have the ability to force some questions (or answers) to become a Community Wiki.
Community Wiki is most useful for questions that are more like polls or lists. For instance, suppose your question is Which is your favourite spiritual book? This question is on topic but there can never be a "right" answer since different people will have different ideas of what is their favourite. It makes more sense for some people to contribute their own favourite, and have the rest of the community vote those items up or down as a kind of audience survey.
You only need 100 karma 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 "poll-like" questions because you could earn enormous karma points very quickly. To prevent this happening, community wiki posts have no effect on the karma points of the questioner. Presently, those who reply to Community Wiki questions still receive karma points for their voted answers.
Additionally, answers that have been made Community Wiki never receive karma points. You might make your answer (instead of your question) Community Wiki when, say, you are quoting from another person and don't want to take credit for doing so.
Community Wiki is also useful when website visitors want to contribute information or knowledge to the website without asking an actual question.
Since a Community Wiki question thread is more social and relaxed than a standard question thread, the Inward Quest site moderators generally don't get involved in moderating them to the usual site standards.
Because of this, please don't automatically assume that the kinds of activities that are permitted on Community Wiki threads will be allowed in other parts of Inward Quest
What are "tags"?
Tags are not keywords in the traditional sense. Instead, think of tags as containers for questions.
A container is useful when it can hold multiple items. It is less useful when it only holds one item. Similarly, tags that have the potential to relate multiple questions together are useful e.g. spiritual-growth. Tags that only relate to one question, or are irrelevant to Inward Quest generally, are not useful e.g. my-cat-felix
If you don't know what tags to use, you can look at an existing similar question and see what tags are being used for that. The number of questions a tag contains is shown to the side of every question.
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
Tags play an important role in discovering which questions are related to each other.
When choosing tags for your questions, please consider using already-existing tags rather than creating new ones unnecessarily. This will help our website software to automatically group related questions together and make it easier for others to browse the site
If you have enough karma points, you can help to make Inward Quest more useful for others by retagging questions that are using inappropriate ones
See more information about tags
Is there a quick way to see what has just been added to a question thread?
Yes there is. Go to the main list of questions and click as shown in the diagram below
For more information, see Direct link to Recent User Activity
Can I use Inward Quest to advertise my own website, or to post affiliate links?
We have provided an area in everyone's account profile for them to include details of any websites they wish to promote. And we ask you to restrict your promotion of your website to your user profile only.
We should also point out that we automatically block all internet search engines from indexing any links in your profile, so creating false account profiles on Inward Quest for SEO/backlinking purposes will achieve nothing.
Please do not attempt to use your questions or answers for advertising purposes, or for trying to create backlinks to another website you are connected with.
It is not difficult to spot when questions/answers are written with the hidden agenda of promoting something. Without warning, we will delete or amend any questions or answers that we believe are being used in this way. And, in certain cases, we may suspend your account.
You will find that if you provide genuine, helpful answers to others, people will naturally want to find out more about you by looking at your profile, and will probably click through to your website anyway.
You will also find that you will gain the trust of those within the community if people notice that you are motivated in providing high-quality answers, rather than simply trying to promote your own site. Paradoxically, this again will probably bring even more interested people to your own website.
An affiliate link, for anyone who doesn't know, is a link to a product or website intended to generate money for the person who posts it.
If we notice affiliate links being posted in questions or answers on Inward Quest, we will delete them and may suspend your account. We wish to keep Inward Quest as unbiased as possible. However, we have no objection to you putting affiliate links into your user profile, if you wish to.
In a similar way, please do not use email-style signatures or footers in your questions or answers either. It creates unnecessary duplication and clutters the questions and answers. The place for this information is also in your profile. If we notice any signatures being used, we will delete them.
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 do I delete something I have posted? How do I delete my account?
You have 60 minutes after posting a question, answer or comment to change your mind and delete it.
After that time, it becomes a permanent part of the site and cannot be deleted. Your questions and answers may continue to be edited by you as often as you wish even after that time has elapsed, but all revisions you make are tracked and viewable by others. By participating here, you are agreeing unconditionally to this. Remember that Inward Quest is not a discussion forum but a growing body of knowledge which others add to as time goes on. Deleting information later will create "holes" in that body of knowledge so it is not permitted.
You can never delete a question (even within 60 minutes) if it has answers attached to it. This is because deleting the question would also delete those answers from other people.
Please remember that everything that is posted to the site, even if deleted within an hour, is stored in our database and can always be viewed by the site moderators later even if it is not viewable publicly. So never post anything to the site that you do not wish others to see. The moderators will take action if they notice the delete function being abused e.g. for private chatting, or intimidating other members
Deleting accounts is not permitted for the same reason that deleting postings is not permitted. If you no longer wish to participate in Inward Quest, just stop using your account.
How do I stop receiving email notifications?
To switch off email notifications from Inward Quest, go to your account page (accessible by clicking your username at the top of any page) and choose User tools. From there, choose Email Notification Settings and uncheck all the boxes and choose No notifications for the rest. You will not hear from the site again after you do this
If you are leaving, you may additionally request that your account is suspended which will hide any information you have written in your account profile and hide your username from the users page. Inform the moderators using the Help button (at the bottom of any page) if you wish your account to be suspended
Can I have multiple accounts on Inward Quest? Can I change my user name?
To prevent misuse of our system, No, you can't have multiple accounts simultaneously here.
If we notice you creating and using more than one account on Inward Quest (and we will), we will suspend your duplicate accounts and may delete any questions/answers posted by them. You also risk having your original account suspended.
If you wish to change your user name, inform the moderators first using the Help button (at the bottom of any page) so we can suspend your existing account. Once you see that your existing account has been suspended, you may now safely create a new account with a new user name. You will, however, have to start again without any karma points for the new account.
Is there anything I can do to help Inward Quest become even better?
Yes, there is... tell your friends about us!
Inward Quest is a community of people who are learning from each other. The more people who take part, the more knowledge will get passed around, and everyone who visits the website will benefit from that exchange of information.
We encourage you to tell others about the website and even point them towards specific questions or answers that you think will be of value to them.
I like it here. Do you have anything else for me to try?
Yes. Join our Inward Quest Community and you can take your knowledge to a new level.
