I've created this guide to answer some frequently asked questions on the boards.


Editing/Deleting Your Posts:

You can't.


Avatars:

To upload an avatar, you'll need to have the image you want to use stored on your hard drive.



Go to your Profile page, and click the Upload Photo button. After you locate the image on your hard drive, you'll be presented with a cropping tool. For the best image clarity, upload an image that is 170 x 170 or larger.

What the cropping tool does is resize any uploaded image to 170 x 170 for the profile view, and then shrinks that down for the 100 x 100 image you see within threads. If you upload an image smaller than 170 x 170, the software will enlarge it for the profile and then shrink that back down for the threads, and your avatar will appear blurry.


Links:

Here's how to post a link using your own text.

This:
will show up in your post as this:
Pointless Waste of Time

The easiest way to do these kinds of links is to first type the text that you want to appear for the link, highlight it using your mouse, and then click the Insert Hyperlink button.



It will add the url tags on either side of the text like this:

Then you want to type an equal sign after url in the first tag, and then paste the link into the tag after the equal sign.

It's not always necessary to post links this way, but if the link you want to post is extremely long and would break the margins, you'll definitely want to post it like this:


Images:

To post an image, paste the image link into the text box, and highlight it using your mouse. With the link highlighted, click the Insert Image button.



If an image you want to post is wide enough that it would break the margins, you'll want to resize it using bbcode.

This example image is 500 pixels wide:
http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q258/Navigator2001Plus/pug.jpg

This:
will display like this:

300 pixels wide and 227 pixels tall

All you have to do is add a space after img and type width=# into the tag. Just replace # with a number indicating how many pixels wide you want the image to be. You can also specify a height using height=#, but that is mostly unnecessary as the image height will be resized to keep the same proportions if you've set the width.

If you for some reason want to resize the image using the wrong proportions, you can do something like this:
and it will display like this:


If you don't own your own website that you can use to upload images, I recommend using Photobucket.


Spoiler Text:

If you're going to post a spoiler in a thread, the courteous thing to do is to make the text that contains the spoiler invisible so that other forum members can only read it by highlighting it.

Type in your spoiler information, and then add before the text, and after it.

will look like:
Bruce Willis was Luke Skywalker's sled!
Highlight to see.

If you're posting invisible text in a thread and want to alert other forum members to it, you might also want to add a notice where the spoiler begins and where it ends.

Example:

-----Spoiler-----
Bruce Willis was Luke Skywalker's sled!
-----End Spoiler-----


Tiny Text:

You might want to make some text in your post smaller to make it seem as though the words were spoken under your breath.

However, some font sizes are too small to be able to read clearly, and you force other people to go to extra effort to read it.

I'm talking about my penis. - normal 10 point font size

I'm talking about my penis. - 9 point font size

I'm talking about my penis. - 8 point font size

I'm talking about my penis. - 7 point font size

7 point is small enough to get across the idea that the words are being whispered, but still large enough to be easily read.

I'm talking about my penis. - 6 point font size

6 point is still readable, but is starting to get small enough that the words are hard to read.

I'm talking about my penis. - 5 point font size

5 point is barely readable.

I'm talking about my penis. - 4 point font size

Anything 4 point and smaller is too small to be able to read. At this point you're forcing the reader to either copy the text somewhere else so it appears normal size, or quote your post so they can read it in the typing area.

If you want to use tiny text, there's no reason to use anything smaller than 7 point, and you can do that like so:


Linking to Specific Posts:

Instead of linking a page from a thread and telling everyone that the post you're talking about is about halfway down the page, you can link to the post itself.

You can find the link in between the name of the poster and the subject of the post.



If you click that button, it will open a page that starts with that post and you can copy the link from your address bar. You can also right-click on the button and copy the link using the menu that pops up. In IE it's Copy Shortcut.

This is the link to this post, for example.


Looking Up Your Own Posts:

You can look up your posts from your profile page.



The number next to "Message board posts" is a clickable link. Click that to open a page that lists every post you've made on the forum.


If anyone has any questions that aren't covered here, send me a PM and I may add them to this guide.