First things first: If you don’t have your Sloper account yet, please get one now. It takes a few seconds, costs nothing, and we do not sell your information to anyone. You need an account to post comments, to use SlopeCharts, or do anything else useful with the site.
Since this site began in early 2005, the community has grown tremendously. Each day, hundreds of comments are posted, and “old timers” have made names for themselves through their insights and trading prowess; there’s even a Hall of Fame page celebrating the best of them. Hang around for a bit, and you’ll quickly pick up on the pulse and personality of the Slope of Hope.
Here are some important things to keep in mind:
Slopers are friendly! The most common concern I hear from “lurkers” (that is, folks who read but don’t participate in comments) is that they are worried about being embarrassed. Don’t be! Slopers are a friendly, helpful bunch that want nothing more than to share, teach, and interact with other traders. This is a well-established community that embraces new participants with open arms. Please join them!
An avatar makes you one of the cool kids: Although it’s not required to have one of those spiffy little pictures next to your screen name, it sure does give you more of a personality. If you didn’t make an avatar when you first set up your account, take a moment to add a picture in your profile by clicking the Change Photo link. It can be the real you, a cartoon, a famous person, or anyone else. Express yourself!
Click on any Sloper’s profile to learn about them: You can read about other folks, choose to highlight their comments, follow them via email, or – in instances where you’d rather not read what a particular person has to say – just Ignore them altogether. There are also Follow and Ignore buttons beneath every comment for convenient one-click access.
Beneath any given post will be many comments, displayed in the order you choose. Every comment has a series of buttons next to it. Here is a guide to what the buttons do:
Regarding that last point, you can use the @ sign to get someone’s attention. Just type @ followed by a person’s screen name, and you can make sure they will see it. When you start typing their screen name, the possible choices will be displayed, as shown below. Just click the one you want, and that person will automatically be emailed your comment.
Every post has comments, which you’ll find if you scroll down to the bottom of an individual post. It is there you can chime in with your own comments or links to share. The comments are “nested”, which means responses (and responses to responses……) are indented to make it clear where independent discussions are taking place within the thread.
Discussion is a vital part of the site. People learn from one another, share ideas, offer suggestions, and create an “atmosphere” on the site which makes it vibrant and self-sustaining.
There are literally millions of comments going back for years in the Slope archives. To search them, you can either click the Search Comments History button near the comment entry box, or you can choose this item from the menu:
At this point, you’ll be sent to this page, where you just type in something you want to search.
It then provides the results, along with a couple of ways to refine the results.
You can point to any comment and click it. If you do so, a new tab will be invoked taking you to the exact location of that specific comment in its original post.
We provide you with a list of all the authors in the results, so you can hone in on one specific author (or, if you want to see them all again, just choose the blank choice at the top of the dropdown).
Likewise, you can filter comments based on the minimum number of Likes received.
There will sometimes be a comment that has an idea, chart, or other information you find so helpful that you would like to bookmark it for later reference. To do this, you can “star” a comment and make your own customized library of favorite comments.
Using it couldn’t be easier. If you want to mark a comment as a favorite, just click the Star icon:
That’s all there is to it! You can “star” as many comments as you like, which makes it very easy to preserve tips, techniques, and other helpful information in your own personalized library.
To access these starred comments, just click this link below the comment entry dialog:
When you do, a new screen will appear with all your starred comments. Clicking on any of them will whisk you off to the original comment so you can see all of it in its original context.
That’s everything you need to know about the comments system. We hope you benefit from the shared knowledge and camaraderie on the site. Click here to see the latest posts so you can jump right into the latest comments.