Frequently Asked Questions

The quick answer is that gasexchange is a question and answer site for anesthesia, critical care, and pain medicine practitioners.

The real answer is however far larger — gasexchange is a worldwide community of consultant anesthetists, anesthesiologists, intensivists, pain medicine specialists, anesthesia technicians, nurses, trainees and specialists of all levels of experience and seniority.

As an open and inclusive community the site hopes to encourage the discussion and sharing of our common knowledge — a creative commons of anesthesia knowledge, up-to-date and evolving as our field does.

We hope that through this sharing we will assist both those beginning their learning and training, as well as continuing the education and development of even the most senior anesthetist. Our learning should never stop.

Simple. If you have a question about anything related to anesthesia you post it to gasexchange. It will be listed on our front page awaiting answers from other users.

If you see a question that you think you can contribute towards answering, then go ahead and post an answer. It's as simple as that. You don't have to post the final and authoritative answer to a question — as long as your answer is on-topic and relevant to the question, it will be welcomed.

There's much more to gasexchange than just questions and answers though. By having users vote on questions and answers, the gasexchange system highlights the good questions and answers and filters out the not-so-good ones so that when you search gasexchange for information, the highest quality, and most relevant information will be easy to find.

gasexchange also utilises the concept of reputation. Users who post high quality questions and answers will have their posts voted up by other users. When this happens, that user accumulates reputation. This means that when you see a post from a high reputation user, you can be more confident about the quality of the information that they are providing. High reputation users also have more control over the way they use gasexchange. This is discussed in more detail below.

No, not at all. Not only can you browse all of the questions and answers on gasexchange without registering, you can even post your own questions and answers and start accumulating reputation without registering! A user account is created on your computer as soon as you start posting to gasexchange.

However, unless you register, you will only be able to access this new account from this single computer (and so will anyone else who has access to this computer). Also, you risk losing access to this account if the cookies on this computer are deleted. For these reasons, we strongly recommend registering to use gasexchange.

Registering an account on gasexchange is easy, and it's free! There are actually 2 ways to go about it.

1. You can register using an email address as your login name and create a password. This should be a familiar way of creating an online account and potentially the easiest.


2. Use an OpenID. OpenID is a way of creating a single password that will allow you access to multiple sites on the internet. If you already have an account with an OpenID provider (such as Google/GMail or Yahoo!) then you may already have an OpenID. We recommend using OpenID if you already have an account with an OpenID provider and are comfortable using OpenID.

More information on registering an account can be found by watching one of our screencasts.

Any question related to anesthesia, critical care or pain medicine. Good questions are those that are detailed, clearly written, and specific. No question is too simple or "newbie". The better written your question is, the more likely you are to get the answer that you want.

Please look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!) before you ask. If you end up asking a question that has been asked before, that is OK and deliberately allowed. Other users will hopefully edit in links to related or similar questions to help future visitors find their way, or a moderator may merge the two questions.

It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, but try to ask it in the form of a question. We also strongly encourage editing, fine-tuning and thus improving the questions that you ask over time. This also applies to your answers!

Questions that are subjective or require extended discussion will not work as well here as questions that can be answered definitively. The voting system for answers means that responses will end up out of order; gasexchange is not designed to be a discussion board. Having said this, some questions in anesthesia are subjective and do require discussion so feel free to ask anything that you think will be of interest, and the community will decide on the merit of your question. Comments beneath answers will tend to remain in order so this is the best place to discuss things.

These numbers represent votes from other users. When users see a question or answer that they think is good, they can vote it up by clicking the arrow above the number. The number represents the total number of positive votes that a question or answer has received. Questions or answers that are unhelpful or off-topic can be voted down resulting in the score being reduced or even becoming negative.

This system enables the best answer to a question to be listed above other answers. It also enables the best questions on a topic to be listed above others when you search gasexchange for questions on that topic.

These numbers are also important because they represent the amount of reputation that a user has gained (or lost) by asking or answering a question.

If an answer has a green tick next to it then that means that the person who asked the question has accepted that answer as the best answer to that question. The person who answered the question receives additional reputation points for having an answer accepted in this way.

If you asked a question, then when you look at it later all of the answers will have an outlined tick next to them. Simply click on one of these ticks to select that answer as the best answer. The user that gave the answer will receive 15 reputation points (You'll receive a small reputation boost yourself if you do this).

The numbers next to the list of questions on the front page are in 3 columns.

No accepted answer	Accepted answer	No answers (yet!)

The number on the left (votes) is the number of votes that a given question has received from other users.

The middle number (answers) is the number of answers that have been given for that question. If the number is orange on a white background that means no answer has yet been selected as the best answer. If the number is white on an orange background that means an answer has been selected. If the number is blue that means no answers have yet been posted (so the number will always be zero of course).

The right number (views) is simply the number of unique visitors that have looked at that question.

All users have a reputation score that appears in blue next to their user name on questions and answers. This score is earned when other users vote on your questions and answers. In this way, reputation becomes a rough measurement of how much the gasexchange community trusts the quality of your questions and answers.

Reputation serves 2 purposes;

• It gives other users an indication of how well trusted or respected a user is within the gasexchange community. When you see a post from a high reputation user you know that their post is more likely to be worth your time and attention.
• It increases the range of actions you are allowed to perform on gasexchange. Higher reputation users are able to perform actions such as creating new tags or editing other users posts.

The following are the reputation scores you need to perform particular actions on gasexchange.

Here's how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by other users: you gain 10 reputation points. If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down: you lose 2 reputation points. You can earn a maximum of 200 reputation points per day. (Note that votes for any posts marked "community wiki" do not generate reputation.) You also receive 15 reputation points if an answer you provide is accepted as the best, or most useful, answer by the person who asked that question. If you accept an answer as the best, or most useful, answer to your question, you will receive 2 reputation points for doing this.

Badges are rewards that are given for achieving particular goals on gasexchange. In a similar way to reputation, they demonstrate the value to the gasexchange community of the user to whom they are awarded

Just like olympic medals, badges are divided into bronze, silver, and gold. Bronze badges are the easiest to get — you'll probably get your first within a short time of starting to use gasexchange — while gold badges will take genuine effort.

You can find the full list of badges on this page.

Tags are the orange labels that appear below questions. Tags are a way of categorizing questions so they can be easily found and grouped. When you ask a question you can label it with up to five tags. If you think of better tags later you can always edit them.

Tags are a better way of organising questions than categories. Many questions touch on several categories so by using tags you are not restricted to simply filing your question away in a single category. With multiple tags you maximize the possibility of other users finding your questions.

You need at least 250 reputation points to create new tags in the gasexchange system. You can use any tag that has already been used on gasexchange if you don't have enough reputation to create a new tag.

If the tag that you need does not yet exist, then using the tag-me tag will identify the question as requiring tagging. A site administrator will create new tags for the question.

If your question goes unanswered for more than two days then you can offer a bounty (in the form of reputation) to encourage someone to answer your question. You offer some of your own reputation (from 50 to 500 points) as the bounty. gasexchange will offer an additional 50 points for the best answer.

Questions with a bounty have the amount of reputation on offer displayed next to the question:

A list of all questions with a bounty currently on offer can be found on the featured tab:

Once initiated, the bounty period lasts seven days. If you mark an accepted answer, your bounty is awarded to the user answering (do note that accepted bounty answers are permanent and cannot be changed). If you do not accept an answer within seven days, the top voted answer will automatically become the accepted answer, and half your bounty will be awarded to that answer. You will always give up the amount of reputation specified in the bounty, so if you start a bounty, be sure to follow up and accept the best answer!

If you are not ready to offer a bounty just yet, you can also keep your question alive by editing it by providing additional details or information you have found yourself on the topic. This will naturally bump your question to the front page and get more people interested in it.

By default your account is associated with a unique colored mosaic that will appear next to all of your questions and answers. If you want to change this to a customized picture you can do this by creating an account and uploading your picture at gravatar.com. The picture is linked to your account via your email address so make sure you have the same email address linked to the photo at gravatar.com that you have registered in your user details with us. Gravatar photos are used by a lot of websites so if you don't want the photo you use on gasexchange showing up on other websites where you post entries then make sure you are using a unique email address for your gasexchange account.

All entries on gasexchange can be edited, but not just my anyone. Questions can only be edited by high reputation users (2000 points or higher) or by gasexchange administrators.

Edits should be performed with the aim of improving a question or answer. This may mean simple changes like correcting spelling or grammar (the gasexchange robot likes to do this), adding links (e.g. to PubMed), or correcting minor factual errors (major factual errors in an answer probably warrant down-voting rather than editing).

The ability to edit questions or answers is one of the strengths of gasexchange. It is one of the ways it will evolve into an authoritative source of anesthesia information. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your posts being edited by trusted users then gasexchange may not be the right community for you.

gasexchange is a global site. Users from all over the world are welcome regardless of whether they are interested in anaesthesia, anesthesia, or anesthesiology (or even anaesthesiology)! Feel free to use whatever spellings or drug names you are comfortable with (eg Lidocaine or Lignocaine, Adrenaline or Epinephrine). If you want to help others find your questions then consider including an alternative spelling if you know that one exists.

We believe that one of the great contributions that gasexchange can make to the global anesthesia and intensive care community is to foster the sharing of knowledge between medical professionals from all over the planet, regardless of language or location.

Yes. All user contributed content (questions, answers, comments) on gasexchange are licensed back to the community under a Creative Commons 'Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike' license. Basically this means that you are free to share and remix the information on gasexchange as long as you attribute all authors, do not use the information for commercial purposes, and re-license your work under the very same by-nc-sa license.

More information on licensing and re-using gasexchange content is available here.

We do. gasexchange will never release or share with a third party any personally identifying information, in particular your email address, that you have shared with us in confidence. Obviously this does not apply to any information you yourself have shared publicly in your user profile.

We maintain a question category called faq with how-to type questions and answers. It's both a good place to learn more about the site as well as a place to ask questions specifically about the system and how you can get the most out of gasexchange. If you are an experienced gasexchange user you may find the descriptions of advanced features useful for supercharging your gasexchange experience.