HOW TO - Make threads, posts and tag users

Sometimes figuring out how to make a new thread is a bit confusing, what section, how to you do it, what the what. That's what this is for! To help you out 🙂 I will also talk about tagging users.

HERE WE GO! 

Making a new thread:

Step 1: Go to the section you want to make a thread in and click "Start a topic" (circled red). On the homepage, each section has a description of what it's about, to help you decide which section to put it in. 

Step 2: Here we come to the New Message screen. This one has a lot going on, so I'm going to break it down by the colours that circle each section.

BLACK: This area tells you what section you're posting in, in case you realise that it's the wrong section or change your mind. If you do change your mind, you have to leave and go into the section you want. 

RED: This is where you type in the title of the post. Pretty simple 😛

GREEN: This is for your email subscriptions, if you want to be notified if someone replies, then you check it. You can also change this in your Settings and Preferences, so if you have it checked but don't want to be emailed, it's an easy fix.

PINK: These are for tags, not @user tags but #tags. We don't use them very much at all, but in the future they could be used to help with trigger and content warnings. For now, they're just there. It's alright if you put tags in and alright if you don't. 🙂 

BLUE: This is where you type your post. Highlighted yellow is your toolbar. This is where you can bold, italic, underline, strikethough, and a whole bunch of stuff

The three areas that are underlined purple are your Rich Text, which just means what you see in the screenshot, HTML, if you're good at coding and want to have some fun. Lastly is Preview, which just shows you what your post will look like. 

Step 3: Click post(the blue button right down the bottom) and you're done! 🙂 Sometimes, you might get an error message talking about invalid HTML, if that happens, just click post again as usually the forums has fixed the problems and you'll be able to post it. 🙂

As you write your post, it will automatically save. You can then see it in your drafts when you go into your profile. A helpful feature 🙂

Replying to posts: When you're replying to posts, there are two options.

Option One Reply: When you choose this option, it takes you to a screen that is much like the one for making a new post. The only new things are the Quote (circled black) and the "view discussion in pop up" (circled blue) and right down the bottom "Replying to:" and the message you are replying to. When you click "Quote", the message you are replying to appears in the body as "user wrote" and their message. The "view discussion in pop up" opens the thread you are replying to in a new tab, if you want to check previous replies. Right down the bottom, you can see the message you are replying to (and the message you would quote).

Option 2 Quick Reply: This option is the simplest option. It doesn't give you any of the fancy bold or italics or underlining but it is nice and quick if you're on a games binge for example 😛

Tagging users:

Quick Reply: In quick reply, you write @ and then their username. For example, @Ben-RO. 

New Topic and Reply: Here is where it gets a bit tricky. When you first press @, you get a drop-down menu of users who have already posted in that conversation. This makes it easy to tag someone if you're already chatting with them. BUT sometimes we have to type their username in. Here it can be a bit difficult, as when we type in the first few letters, using Ben-RO as an example, we get a lot of usernames that might not be the one we're after. Eventually though, you'll get the username you're after and you can tag them by selecting it. Right @Ben-RO? 😛

And that's all folks! 🙂 If you've got any questions, post them here!