To help you figure things out, there is a Scoop Admin Guide which can hopefully answer most of your questions.
Some tips:
Most of the layout is changed in "Blocks", found in the admin tools menu
Features can be turned on and off, and configured, in "Site Controls" in the admin tools menu
Stories have an "edit" link right beside the "Full Story" link on an index page, and right beside the "Post a Comment" link on the full story page. They can also be edited by clicking the story title in the "Story List" admin tool
Boxes are what allow you to write new features for Scoop; they require a knowledge of the perl programming language to work with effectively, although you can often make small changes without knowing much perl. If you would like a feature added but cannot program it yourself, ScoopHost does custom Scoop programming as one of its services.
If you aren't sure where to look for a particular feature or piece of display, try the "Search Admin Tools" link in the admin tools menu.
A "Red Herring" fallacy (also known as an "irrelevant conclusion" fallacy) is a logical error in which an argument is, intentionally or not, constructed of irrelevant or false inferences, with the intention of masking the lack of substantive arguments and/or implicitly replacing or diverting attention away from the actual subject of the discussion, by proving a different proposition than the one it is purporting to support. And I can tell you that defending Proposal 12-5 out in the social media sphere has been an education in countering Ignoratio Elenchi.
The more "experienced" readers of this site might recall Michigan's Great Taxpayer Revolt of 1983. In January of that year, newly-inaugurated Governor James Blanchard, who had promised in his 1982 campaign against Richard Headlee that he would not address the state's financial problems through a tax increase except as a last resort, wasted a grand total of one month sliding a 38% increase in the state's income tax through the Democrat-controlled state legislature. The resulting fifteen-target recall campaign succeeded in taking out both Phil Mastin and David Serotkin (flipping the State Senate to Republican control), triggered the political ascension of a theretofore-obscure state senator by the name of John Engler (whose 1990 gubernatorial campaign against Blanchard carried the shadow of the 1983 revolt), and so thoroughly spooked state legislators that tax increases were a very touchy subject on both sides of the aisle for the next two decades.
