Post by chrisk on Dec 24, 2012 18:22:59 GMT -5
Well, we've all settled in pretty well at the new board I think, but I've been wanting to post something with a few tips about how to do some of the things that worked a different way on the old website.
Smileys! There's a different crowd of smiley faces built into the freeforums 'Post message' interface, but of course we can include our own smileys using image links, just as long as they're available somewhere on the net. It's probably not a good idea to link back to www.stringingwords.com, as the hosting for that will expire at some point. I've taken all the smileys and uploaded them to my blog for everybody to use: you can just quote this post and find the right IMG syntax, then copy and paste that into another message, (or keep the list somewhere handy!)
Colors! The color picker on the GUI interface only lists 16 preset colors, but you can use hex colors, like this - just turn the parentheses into square brackets:
(color=0000CC)Colors!(/color)
The only difference between this and the syntax that we used on the old forum is that the old site used a # before the hex code, so if you're copying color codes over from an old word count thread or anything, just take that out and it should work.
Sending PMs. If you want to send a private message to another member, you can, but it's not an option in the toolbar beneath their posts anymore. Just click on their username link at the top left of the post, above the avatar (if they have one,) and that'll take you to their profile. From there, you should have the option to 'Send Private Message' - if you're logged in.
Lists. The bullet list button on the posting interface works pretty well, but it doesn't give us all the fancy different kinds of bullets.
Background colors. This one has me stumped for the time being - the freeforums bbcode doesn't appear to support the (bcolor) tag. There might be a way to do it with javascript footer extensions, but I won't get that sorted out really soon.
So, I hope this has been helpful. I can see that there's some cool stuff that we have with this new forum software that we didn't have with the old one, but I haven't really played with much of it yet. If you want to share your own tips here, feel free!
And Happy Holidays.
Smileys! There's a different crowd of smiley faces built into the freeforums 'Post message' interface, but of course we can include our own smileys using image links, just as long as they're available somewhere on the net. It's probably not a good idea to link back to www.stringingwords.com, as the hosting for that will expire at some point. I've taken all the smileys and uploaded them to my blog for everybody to use: you can just quote this post and find the right IMG syntax, then copy and paste that into another message, (or keep the list somewhere handy!)
Colors! The color picker on the GUI interface only lists 16 preset colors, but you can use hex colors, like this - just turn the parentheses into square brackets:
(color=0000CC)Colors!(/color)
The only difference between this and the syntax that we used on the old forum is that the old site used a # before the hex code, so if you're copying color codes over from an old word count thread or anything, just take that out and it should work.
Sending PMs. If you want to send a private message to another member, you can, but it's not an option in the toolbar beneath their posts anymore. Just click on their username link at the top left of the post, above the avatar (if they have one,) and that'll take you to their profile. From there, you should have the option to 'Send Private Message' - if you're logged in.
Lists. The bullet list button on the posting interface works pretty well, but it doesn't give us all the fancy different kinds of bullets.
Background colors. This one has me stumped for the time being - the freeforums bbcode doesn't appear to support the (bcolor) tag. There might be a way to do it with javascript footer extensions, but I won't get that sorted out really soon.
So, I hope this has been helpful. I can see that there's some cool stuff that we have with this new forum software that we didn't have with the old one, but I haven't really played with much of it yet. If you want to share your own tips here, feel free!
And Happy Holidays.