Whether you are a lerker, i.e someone who reads but never posts or if this if the first time to the board and you immediately signed up, you are most welcome. The biggest problem about being a newt is what do you do now. You've signed up, you can participate but where do you start. This is a tough question so I thought I would write a guide for you all.
Menu
Along the top of the board there is a menu: User Control Panel, View your posts, FAQ, Members, Logout. Let's start by sorting out your profile so select User Control Panel.
Setting up your profile
This takes you to a new screen. Fill in all the parts you feel happy to fill in. towards the bottom you have choices about if you want your online status to be hidden or not. If you want emails sent to you when someone posts in a thread you've posted in/created or if you want emails sent to you if you have a Private Message (PM).
Signiture + Images
You can also create yourself a signiture. This will show everytime you post or send a PM. es that's the signature, also called sig or siggy by some people. You already know the space for it at the profile page.
Maybe more people can help at the Multimedia section for this kind of questions about images. See also the stickies there about posting images in case you are completely new at this.
Writing the address to your .jpg or .gif image file between the two Img codes, like this:
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[img]www.photobucket.com/accountexample/example.jpg[/img]
Avatar
At the bottom there is something called an Avatar control panel. This allows you to pick the picture you want under your name on the board.
Its easier to have your picture uploaded to a host site. I use http://www.photobucket.com you have to make a profile and its all free and easy. I'm sure you can figure that part out on your own.
Now, on your profile here, down at the bottom where you are putting in the URL for the picture you want, you have to put it in the bar that says "Link to an off-site avatar" and NOT "Upload avatar from another URL" and I never upload one from my machine, because whenever you upload an image directly to this board, it has to be a certain size, so if you just link it, it can be as big as you want, just not too big for the screen (try to make it so that people don't have to scroll across to read messages.) So in other words, put the URL in the bar right above the button to see the gallery.
Once you've done all that don't for get to press submit or else you'll lose all your hard work.
Actually posting
Now you've done all this you're ready to post, but where do you begin. Well that's easy, head over to the Introduce Yourself. Start a new post introducing yourself. Tell us about your parish, tell us about your school, tell us what your likes and dislikes are. It doesn't have to be an essay, just let people know a little about who they are talking to.
General Posting
Think carefully before posting, are you posting in the right area, have you carefully thought about what you posting. You don't want to accidental upset people.
Trolls + Spammers
Every now and then there are people who post on the board who post spam (porn links, or adverts etc,). If there is a troll, I.E. someone who says something nasty about the topic on the board to get posters angry and get in to a slanging match. Ignore the thread. POst the thread in the narc zone, and then they will delt with accordingly. Try not to post in the thread or answer them. It's what they want. If you don't answer they can't win.
Codes for adding urls, pictures and other such things.
Pictures
If you want to post a picture you need a url (and web address) it must start with http:// then put the http://www.madeup.whateveritis.jpg. All pictures to post correctly must have a url that ends in .jpg or .gif
You must also watch the size of the pictures you post as many member only have dail up connections and pictures take an age to load up. So be aware of that please. Using somewhere like http://www.picturebucket.com will allow you to re size the picture to something smaller.
Once you have the url you need to put that inside codes. It should look something like this.
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[img]http://www.madeup.whateveritis.jpg[/img]
URLs
Again you need the url and put it between [url][/url]
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[url]http://www.cdyp.org[/url]
[color=indigo]The link will come out looking like this.
http://www.cdyp.org
With links you can name them rather than having the web address showing. Like so.
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[url=http://www.cdyp.org]Croydon Deanery Youth Project[/url]
That will come out looking like this.
Croydon Deanery Youth Project
Text Formatting
For underlined text put the text between
For bold text put the text between
For italic text put the text between
You can change colours by putting the text between
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[color=???] and [/color]
[color=indigo]So here is your guide to where to start on the forum. There is more answers to be found in the F&Q section.
If you have any question by all means feel free to PM admin, we are all wanting to make your stay here as comfortable and easy as possible.
So sit back and enjoy the ride. See you around the board.
