New Forum - Quick n Dirty Tips

Alrighty, a lot of people have had some problems adjusting to the new forums, so I put together these "quick n dirty" tips to help ease the transition:

First of all, if you JUST want to see the normal English threads, click this link and bookmark this page.

Wait, what was that? How did I make that link actually appear green and bolded like the links on the old forums did? Why I use the fancy new WYSIWYG Editor now that's built into the forums, way nicer than hard coding if you ask me.

How do I turn it on? Well, you turn it on in your "User Control Panel", just click the button you see here:



Click that and a world of opportunities await!

On the left hand side of the page is where you'll see all sorts of options, take a look:




Here are the options and what you can find there -

Edit Your Details: Change your registered e-mail and password, your personal information including DoB, Bio, homepage, messenger names, etc. etc.

Contacts & Friends: Add contacts and friends here... not quite sure what the difference is though, but I'm sure someone else will fill us in.

Social Groups: Yes, these new forums allow us to have our very own "social network". For all you MySpacers and Facebookers, here's the place to be! It shows a list of all current groups and allows you to create your own group (with a link at the bottom of the page)

Edit Avatar: Guess "Note: The maximum size of your custom image is 100 by 100 pixels" That's 20 more than before!

Edit Signature: Skip this one for now and come back, I'll tell you why later, just trust me.

Edit E-Mail and Password: A really dumb and pointless section, because all it has is the E-Mail and Password, which should have just been left on the same page as the rest of your Personal Details. In fact, the button on Edit Your Details just goes here! Oh well.

Edit Options: Now THIS is what I'm talking about, this is the good stuff. Here you can make yourself Invisible, hide your reputation level, adjust every way that people can try to contact you, CHANGE YOUR DISPLAY OPTIONS (I prefer 100 posts per page myself), time zone, forum skin, and what's this? Under Miscellaneous Options there is an option to change your message editor! I suggest that EVERYONE right now go and change this to Enhanced Interface. Why? Because that's the full What You See Is What You Get editor that we never had on the old forums. Instead of having to type code, you get to use a nice interface that anyone familiar with even Wordpad should be able to use!

Edit Ignore List: Here you can add any name to your ignore list manually that you want to ignore. Remember folks, copy and paste is your friend!

Now go back to....

Edit Signature (for real this time): Here you can completely edit and format your signature. No more 300 character limit, instead, you have a limit of 5 "lines". There are a couple areas in this section, Edit Signature and Signature Picture. To date, I have NOT been able to get "Signature Picture" to work at ALL, I always get an "invalid URL" message no matter what. So what *I* do, and I recommend you do too if you want a signature picture, is to sacrifice one of your "lines" in the text signature to input a signature picture instead. To do that, you click the little icon on the editor that looks like two mountains and a sun. Then you can enter in the URL of your signature picture. Voila! There it is!

You also come face to face with the WYSIWYG EDITOR . I have two quick and dirty tips that should make using this "scary" new editor a breeze.

1. Hold your mouse over each button for a second until the Tool tip shows up. That will show you exactly what that button does, no guessing needed!
2. WRITE YOUR TEXT FIRST, format later. Seriously, it's so much easier to just type out everything you want to say, and then format. Prime example - do you remember how on the old forums you'd click the Add URL button and then have to enter the URL and the text in two separate boxes? With this editor, not anymore! Simply TYPE YOUR TEXT FIRST, then highlight it, THEN click the "Insert Link" button. Now you just enter the URL and BAM, all your text is automatically linked!

I have created a handy ImageShack gallery for you to use to get your hands on Mr. Yellow!

A few more quick ones:

Clicking on a person's name will bring up a quick menu for you to use!



Now if only they'd add an ignore button there it'd be much easier to ignore people.

In the top right corner of the page, there are several menu options that allow you to interact with the thread, explore them all!







And finally, here is a quick breakdown of what the buttons at the bottom of a post do for you:








Also,

At the bottom of all threads, right between the last post on the page and the quick reply box, lies a little area about "tags". Tags are another method of searching the forums, or just describing a thread. If you click on the Edit Tags link shown in the picture below, you can add tags yourself.



Try it out even on this thread, why not?

Nifty New Tool Found

Just how I described above how you can Subscribe to a thread and it'll appear in your user control panel, I've just discovered that you can do the same thing with entire forums!

If you're anything like me, you frequent only 2 or 3 forums regularly. Why would you want to have to scroll past all those others that you always ignore when you can choose to just see the ones that you WANT to see.

To do this, just go to the forum that you wish to favorite and click the Forum Tools link you'll see in the top right corner of that forum, and then click the Subscribe to this Forum link. A picture is provided here for you:




After you do that, it'll appear RIGHT below your subscribed threads. Handy! Take a look:




I'm really beginning to grow fond of these new forums!

+rep for you. And Option B for me

Note: Rating a thread doesn't show anything until it has 2-3 or so rates.

Regarding the "Special Links" (if you're using Firefox)

Someone sticky this!

One change I've notice is that you have to close a color change in you sig or it ignores the color change. The old forums didn't need this and it caught me out.

So if you use
[color=####]

remember to add
[/color]
at the end

First guide of the new forums? Trust PK to do one on the subject of the forum. Good job.

//Jack

Actually, you can get colored links without the stupid underscores. Just color the text before you link it. Also, you can get the link to any post just by clicking on the little #NUM in the top right corner.

Awesome Dinah I didn't know those things! Hope you don't mind if I edit the OP to reflect the correction.

Some good info there, thanks for posting this guide

Looks like a certain amount of time and effort went into this guide, its very good.

I was wrong about you perhaps PhiloticKnight, I am big enough to say I take back what I said in the other thread

Does anyone else have some tips? I was hoping that people could all share here and help each other.

Ah, so that's the WYWW-whatever editor. I've seen this used on other forums, specifically on a friend's forum. I gotta' say, its colour scheme doesn't match the forum skin at all, as it seems to have been lifted directly from the software and not customized in the slightest. I cannot say I'm in favour of it hiding my tags for me, though. I've been writing my tags by hand for years and find it ENORMOUSLY ANNOYING to have to click through menus to get to them, and even WORSE to not see them. Luckily, there's this tiny little button in the top right which switches between Editor Modes and allows me to see my tags anyway.

I've never been a fan of big-time formatting. Even when I type in Word, I never use anything more than spell checking, paragraphs and the occasional Bold. Never was a fan of bolding words, myself. Always preferred to just CAPITALISE them for emphasis. I suppose it's cool if you want to make bulleted lists or complicated guides or just be fancy, but I generally find no use for fancy formatting, text sizes, text colour and so on and so forth. The menu should still be useful for reminding myself of tags I've forgotten, though. For the life of me, I can never remember if it's [color:] or [color=].

For all of that said, though, thank you for making this guide. It makes a lot of things very much more clear. Here are a few questions:

*Do you have any solution to retaining the old ability to see the post you are responding to WHILE you are responding to it?
*Do you have any solution to getting nested quotes short of typing them out, ourselves?
*Is there any way to look at the code of another person's post so that we can see their tags and links directly?
*Is there any way to prevent our posts from being discarded mid-typing if we back out of the posting page?

I'll see what else I can think of.

*edit*
Why do all of the pics you're linking to look like they're 256 or 16 colours or some such?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

My biggest gripe about these boards is that if I just come in to check out one section, say guides, and have it up for a significant amount of time, then the next time I come back the "contains new posts" in all of the other sections will reflect that time that I was on, but not in those sections. On the old boards it would reflect that for the guides section, but the other sections would not change until I went into them specifically. Does anyone know if there's a way to change that here?

I will throw in here that Zombie_Man's style skins are, while pretty much just a visual change, a great intermediary step between the old boards and the new. For a dumkopf like me, it's like training wheels.

Very useful resource, PK! Thanks for posting it, and special thanks to all the contributors.

Great guide Phil! Kudos!

+Rep for you Phil. Thanks for the tips!

One thing I notice is that if you hover your mouse over the thread title, it gives you a short preview of the first post

Good thread, PK.
There's a first time for everything!