Creating New Topics and other Hints

Introduction to the forum software and its feature. You can use this for test postings. This is not a boating forum
jimh
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Creating New Topics and other Hints

Postby jimh » Fri Oct 09, 2015 12:45 pm

The CREATE NEW TOPIC button appears only when you are looking at a listing of a forum's contents. It does not appear in a listing of a message thread or posting. This should help to prevent accidental creations of new threads when only a reply to an existing thread was intended.

For example, as you are reading this message or posting, the button at the lower left is a POST REPLY button. You won't have the option to create a new thread. However, if you jump up one level in navigation, the NEW TOPIC button will appear. You can easily navigate up one level by using the navigation links that appear on the light-blue banner above. The BOARD INDEX link will take you to the top level of the forum. The INTRODUCTION link will take you to a listing of the TOPICS in the INTRODUCTION forum.

HTML and BBCode

You cannot post HTML in forum postings, but there is a easy workaround for this called BBCode. To turn text into hypertext or a working link, you must use the BBCode called [url]and[/url]. When composing a post you will see the URL button on the tool bar above the text window. If you hover the cursor over the URL button you get a very concise explanation of how the [URL] code works, but let me explain it more verbosely.

There are two ways to use UBB Code:

--to make a URL become a hyperlink, or

--to turn text into a hyperlink

To make a URL become a hyperlink, you must put the UBBCode [url]at the beginning of the URL and then append[/url] at the end. The text enclosed by the URL tags must not have any spaces. The editor tries to help you by deleting any leading or trailer white space from the text contained inside the URL tags.

Let's make the URL http: // continuouswave . com become a hyperlink (I had to put some spaces in there to prevent this from automatically being converted to a hyperlink by the forum posting software). We just add [url]ahead of it and[/url] after it. You can do this easily with the editor by just highlighting the text and clicking on the URL button. I can't illustrate that easily, but you can try it yourself. It is very simple to use. Also, it looks like any valid URL will be automatically converted into a hyperlink by the forum posting process. You probably won't need the [URL] tag wrappers.

To make text become a hyperlink, you use a slight variation in the UBBCode. You wrap the text, which can include spaces, with the tags [url=aWorkingURL] and the[/url] tag at the end. For example, to turn "continuouswave's Reference section" into a hyperlink, you would write it like this:

[ URL=http://continuouswave.com/whaler/reference] continuouswave's Reference section[/url]

Now in order for that text above to not turn into a hyperlink I intentionally left a space in the first [url]tag. You should not do that. Here is what the hypertext will look like:

Visit continouswave's Reference Section for more information on Boston Whaler boats.

Notice that the PREVIEW function does not seem to apply the transform to hyperlinks for the URL tags. They will show up when the post is actually submitted. If you get it wrong, don't worry because you can EDIT your post!

The EDIT function is invoked by the little pencil icon. Give that a try, too

FILES, IMAGES, ATTACHMENTS, LIMITS

The forum can also host images to be included in posts. The maximum file size of an image that will be accepted for uploading to the forum is 256-KB. The maximum number of attachments per post is three. The maximum total stored uploaded file size is also limited. Many modern devices now routinely capture digital images that are very large files, more than 8-Megabytes. There is no room for hosting files of this size. For viewing purposes and as illustrations, image files as small as 50-KB are completely sufficient.

If you want to include an image in a post and have the FORUM host the image for you, the image file must be no larger than 256-KB. You can include the image in your posting by just dragging and dropping it into the post composition window. You will be prompted for descriptive text to be associated with the file or image. PLEASE INCLUDE DESCRIPTIVE TEXT with your image, as this text will be seen as a caption for the image. The image file is uploaded to the FORUM and hosted there.

If you have images hosted on a public hosting site, you can include those images in your posts using the [IMG] tags. For example, to include an image hosted at

http://yourHost.com/yourImagefile.jpg

you can just wrap that URL with the [ img ] and [ /img ] tags. (Again, I had to intentionally leave a space in the tag names to stop them from working as tags.) Let me test that theory with an image I have available:

Image

Note that there is a width limit to the image size of 900-pixels.