How to use this forum!

[Coach Huld]

This community board is powered by a software called PhpBB. Long before Reddit, Facebook, Twitter etc pulled people onto centralised websites this was my main access point into online communities. So I'm very familiar with its workings, but it's been a while since PhpBB was hot and it's no longer the most intuitive place to be.

SO! Allow me to help you out with some basics!
Please reply to this thread if you're struggling to figure anything out and I'll make sure to add it.

HOW TOPICS AND POSTS WORK
Each Topic is one long string of posts and reply posts, from original to most recent. If there are enough posts, it gets split into pages. You don't get nested threads of replies like in Facebook. Once you make a post, any registered user who has access to that forum can reply.

Preview: Whether you're making a new post or a reply, you'll have the same edit page with formatting options lined up above the text box and the choice to Preview or Submit below. If you're using images and formatting, it's always useful to click "Preview" before you make the actual post so you can make sure it works. This'll show you the post in full on top. To keep editing, scroll past it to find the text box.

Quoting: If you're responding to a specific part of a post within a topic, click the quotation mark ( " ) button to the top right of the post you want to quote. This will open a new edit page with the entire contents of that post inside a bracket labelled "Quote" with a few added bits of info: name of the person you're quoting, their member ID number, the time code and the post ID. Delete any part of the post you don't need.

Check this out:

Hello everyone!

Here's a wee thread for new members to introduce yourselves!

This is what it looks like in edit:

Code: Select all

[quote="Coach Huld" post_id=10 time=1721908283 user_id=2]
Hello everyone!

Here's a wee thread for new members to introduce yourselves!
[/quote]

If you press that tiny arrow pointing up at the end of "Coach Huld wrote" it'll actually take you back to the post quoted, even if it's in a different topic like this quote! It's an incredibly useful way to keep track of longer topics, especially ones where multiple people are responding to multiple different posts and ideas, or if someone asks a question that has been answered somewhere else.

To quote from a different topic: Find the topic you'll like to quote from, click to quote reply, copy all the text in the editor and then leave without submitting. Come back to the topic you want to quote to, start a reply, then paste the text into that edit box. You can have as many quotes from as many posts and topics as you like.

You can also just make your text look like a quote by using the quote command from the formatting buttons above the text editor. There's an example of that further down, where I demonstrate what the BBCode looks like.

HOW TO ACCESS YOUR PROFILE
In the top-right corner of any page on this forum, there's a small collection of icons. In the standard style, it looks something like this:

IMG_2908.jpeg (46.37 KiB) Viewed 34 times

IMAGE: A series of green buttons with simple white icons: From left to right: An exclamation mark and the word Rules, a silhouette of a person, an inbox, a bell and a box with an arrow pointing out of it.

That's Rules, Profile, Private Messages and Log Out. You might also have a question mark for FAQs, depending on the kind of device you're on.
Click the little silhouette (of a man! Scaramouche! Scaramouche!) and then the option for User Control Panel.

And that's it. Depending on the style you're using, it will look slightly different. In some styles, it shows your actual user name and a tiny version of your avatar if you have one, or just the avatar. But it's always somewhere in that top right corner.

EDIT AVATAR/ PROFILE PHOTO
Go to your User Control Panel and find the category called "Profile". This is where you can add any kind of info you want, like signatures and socials etc. Now click Edit Avatar. You can either upload an image to the forum, or you can link to an already existing remote file somewhere else on the internet. Linking has become less useful these days as you can't really copy image URLs from instagram etc these days.

I've tried to make uploading as simple as possible, as PhpBB is a bit finicky. With the "Upload Avatar" option selected, click near the bottom of the page to pick an image to upload. I'd recommend cropping your image to a square 1:1 format as that looks best, but you can really do what you want.

FORMAT YOUR TEXT
You can't just type ctrl-B or whatever to make your text bold, this isn't MS Word. You use what's called BBCode, which you can read more about here. But basically it looks like this in your post editor:

Code: Select all

[b] This text would be bold. [/b]
[img]https://www.bismuthgym.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/IMG_2545-edited-scaled.jpeg[/img] 
[i]IMAGE: the lower body of a person with blue leggings and colourful tattoos setting up for a deadlift.[/i]

[url=https://bismuthgym.com] This is a link [/url]
[url]https://bismuthgym.com[/url] - The same link, but different.

Notice that the format is the same. A bracketed command (b/ url/ img/ etc) with an opening bracket and a closing bracket. The closing bracket has a forward slash to indicate end of command. Some have added features, like the url.

And that would look like this in the post:

This text would be bold.

IMAGE: the lower body of a person with blue leggings and colourful tattoos setting up for a deadlift.

This is a link
https://bismuthgym.com - The same link, but different.

You don't have to know how to code, you can use the row of buttons on top of this text box. I'm not going to go over them all individually, I'd recommend playing around with it instead or reading the BBCode page. But some good stuff to know:

Basic formatting:
To make text bold, italicised or underlined, either click the corresponding buttons and then write the text inside the code that pops up around your cursor, or highlight text you've already written and then click the button.

To make a link:
Option 1: Simply paste in the address, highlight it, then click the little chain icon. that will automatically add the opening and closing tags for the URL code around your link.
Option 2: If you'd like the link to be regular text, highlight the part of the text you'd like to use for the link, click the chain button, then, after the "[url" bit, type a "=" then paste the URL. It will look like that first link example in the code above.

EMBED IMAGE/ VIDEO
Option 1: If it's a basic image file from another website, it couldn't be more simple. Click the "insert image" button that looks like a little landscape, then paste the URL to your image into that bit of code.

Option 2: If it's a social media post or a video from a known video hosting website, you use the "Media Embed" button to the far right of the list and pop the URL in the middle of that. It recognises and works with all the major media sites like Instagram and Youtube etc. If it doesn't work, just use a regular link OR upload it as an attachment!

Option 3: Upload an attachment! This works for more than just images, but is obviously very useful for that purpose. The attachment option should be near the bottom of the post editor, below your "save draft, preview, submit" buttons. It'll be in a group of three tabs, Options, Attachments and Poll Creation. Click Attachments and "Add Files". On a computer, you can also drop files into the editor. Once uploaded, you can click to "place inline", which will insert a bit of code with the file URL into the editor box and then you're done!

MORE TO COME LATER