Overview
Bolt Help was a one stop shop for tips, tricks, and assistance with Bolt.com. It provided everything from member profile layouts, tricks that provided ways to work around Bolt quirks, custom Bolt badges, and certainly not least, personal help.
The site was run by one of the most interesting and talented people I know, DistortedSmile. She has also been known as Irish_Anarchist, DelayedReality, and periodically as Tará. She has a family of El Caminos, enjoys making people squirm while she tattoos them, creates audio/visual art, drives trucks, and plays World of Warcraft.
Bolt Help is one of the few Bolt-related websites that is still partially online today. I'm mirroring some parts of it though, as I'm not sure when it might go dark.
Bolt Profile Layouts
Tará designed many Bolt profile layouts and made them available to anyone who wanted their profile to be a bit more stylish.
You can view a sample of the available profile designs here: Bolt Help - Profile Layouts (mirror)
Bolt Help Club Badges
There were many badges that Tará designed and handed-out to Bolt members for participation in the Bolt Help Club and for assisting other members.
Most of the badges are available for viewing here: Bolt Help - Club Badges (mirror)
You can also look at the descriptions on the Bolt Help website. No promises on how long it will be online though. View: Bolt Help - Club Badges
Bolt Help/Vastness Collaboration
DistortedSmile and eviltechie worked together on a couple of projects.
Badge Management/Display System — This was PHP/MySQL application that allowed Tará to manage the list of available badges and to give them to people who had earned them. Bolt members needed only to add a code to their Bolt profile, and any Bolt Help Club badges that they had earned would be displayed. In addition to making the management of the badges easy, this also made it so Bolt members knew that if they were looking at someone else's badges that they were legitimately earned.
Bolt Help Ticket/Response System — This was definitely the most advanced Bolt-related system short of the Profile Logger. It allowed Tará to record answers to common questions about Bolt. Then Bolt members could send a question to an email address, the system then analyzed their question to see if it could likely be answered by one of the prerecorded responses. If the prerecorded response was adequate, that response would be automatically sent to the person. However, if the system couldn't automatically answer the question, it would add it to a ticket queue that Tará would respond to and her response would be sent to the person.
Bolt Member Magazine
DistortedSmile edited and released a couple issues of an online magazine with content from Bolt members.
View: boltmembers.blogspot.com
Bolt Member Names List
DistortedSmile compiled what may be the most complete list of Bolt member names.
View in its original location: Bolt Member Names List
View our mirror: Bolt Member Name List (mirror)
Finding DistortedSmile
These days, you can find this rare spawn creature in the social network forest.
Facebook: Tará O'Sullivan
Twitter: @DistortedSmile
Tumblr: Tará's Blog of Inanity
WoW Character's Facebook: Brichåron of Kaarinos
