BBS Posting Tips
Here are a few tips for our BBS system:
User Control Panel Towards the top of the page, there is a
Settings link. This lets you edit your personal preferences for the Board. Many defaults can be can be changed in "Edit Options". Please make sure you have Time Zone set to "Automatically detect DST settings".
Posts per Page In the Settings > General Settings, you can choose how many posts you want to see per page if you use linear view (recommended, see below).
Go to First New Post Probably my favorite tip. This feature let's you pick up where you left off, jumping to the oldest unread message in a thread, without scrolling through to find it yourself. It keeps track across multiple devices. You must use
Linear View (the one with all the posts on one or several pages). Useful for the really long threads, though you must be logged in for it to work. In any particular forum, just to the left of an unread thread's subject, there's a small, blue box with "New". Click that button to jump to the first unread message. (If you float your mouse over the button, it says "Go to first new post".) While reading a post, you can
temporarily change the view if you want the context within the thread; click on "Display" just above the top post in the upper, right area of the screen.
Preview Post There is a "Preview Post" button you can click when creating a new message. If you're quoting, creating tables, or using other formatting codes (see below),
please preview to check yourself before posting. You can edit for a few minutes after you post. If you're writing a really long post, it's best to create it in a different editor and copying the text in when you're done, or you may lose you post to a time-out error.
Quoting Rather than hitting Reply, use the Quote button and leave the link-back code (the part at the very beginning), so readers can jump back to the original quoted message. Do strip the parts of the quote out you're not addressing and leave the parts you are, but make sure to leave the "[quote]" and "[/quote]" tags intact.
Stats Put stats and other tables between the tags "[code]" and "[/code]" (see VB Tags, next) and it'll make your post much more readable. The easiest way I've found to set up tables is to use Excel and Notepad, Excel to set up the data and Notepad to strip everything except the text and tabs.
1) Set up your data in Excel
2) Copy and paste into Windows' Notepad (with the default Lucida Console font)
3) Tweak the tabs as needed to get it back into columns in Notepad (long records sometimes move them out of place)
4) Copy and paste between [code] and [/code] tags
5) Preview!
A slightly easier way is to just use the Courier font in the WYSIWYG editor (User CP > edit options), but note that the BBS system strips multiple spaces down to a single space which can really squeeze your table. The Code tag doesn't strip spaces.
Tables There is a table feature now. You have to use "Enhanced Interface - Full WYSIWYG Editing" (you can change it via Settings > General Settings). You'll see a row of buttons that are for creating and editing tables.
VB Tags Our board supports most of the tags listed
here. You can use them to format your messages for better readability. Please don't bold entire posts, though, or otherwise make it too outlandish. "Better" not "Noisier".
Spoilers The Spoiler tag is used by placing the text between [spoiler] and [/spoiler]. This allows text to be
Search Please use the search function
before starting a new thread. Many topics have been covered already, and the Mods will probably just merge your new thread into the appropriate one - a balance between having threads pushed off the front page (and thus into purgatory) in just a few hours or keeping them on the front page for 24-48 hours.
Discussions about Tips can be found
here.
-jk