[Subject:]

Since posting messages is basically what forums are all about, we will spend some time looking at the various options and techniques available. Those who are familiar with forum software, HTML or bulletin board code in general may prefer to skip straight to the Bulletin Board Code.

1. Posting Basics
   1. Starting a New Topic
   2. Replying to a Topic
   3. Quoting a Post
2. Standard Posting Options
   1. Bulletin Board Code
3. Tags and Nesting (for beginners)
4. Additional Options
   1. Return to this topic.
   2. Attachments
5. References
   1. SMF Bulletin Board Code

Posting Basics

Starting a New Topic

Browse to the board where you wish to post and click the New Topic button (positioned by default at both the top and the bottom of the board, as shown in the User Help Introduction), which should take you to the Start new topic screen. While this presents a number of options, the two most important are the Subject field and main Message field (not labeled as such, but obvious by its size). So enter your subject and start to type (or paste) your message into the main text area, noting that a message missing either a subject or a body will not be accepted for posting until it has both. If you're happy with your plain text message, you can then post it by clicking the Post button and/or preview it first by clicking the Preview button, but there are many further options available to make things that little bit more interesting.

New topic *

Standard Options omitted for clarity and demonstrated below. Subject: Additional Options omitted for clarity and demonstrated below. shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview

• Some forums show the navigation tree at the top in a space-saving horizontal mode.
• Some forums may be configured to offer an additional Spell Check button alongside the Post and Preview options.

Replying to a Topic

Replying to a topic is basically the same as starting a new topic, but it's not necessary to enter anything in the Subject field unless you wish to change what's already there.

Quoting a Post

To reply to a post by quoting it, you can either click the Quote button for the relevant post and add your own message to the quoted text or click the Reply button followed by Insert Quote from the relevant post in the 'Topic Summary' below, but note that:

• Both these options add a link to the original post showing the name of the poster and the date and time of the post, whereas the Bulletin Board Code quote tag simply quotes the relevant post without this additional information.
• You can also retain or add the 'author' attribute independently of the full Quote function, as demonstrated in the SMF Bulletin Board Code Reference below.

Standard Posting Options

Change Color Black Red Green Orange Purple Blue Code Syntax Actionscript Apache Log AppleScript Bash C C++ C# CSS Diff DOS Genero HTML4 Strict Java Javascript Per Shell SQL XML #other syntax

Bulletin Board Code

Bulletin Board Code (or BBC) is the essential tool for formatting and changing the appearance of your post. While it affects the plain text in much the same way as the formatting tools in any word processor, the main Message field does not behave in a WYSIWYG manner, so you should preview your message if you need to see what it will look like when posted.

A complete SMF Bulletin Board Code Reference is provided below.

Tags and Nesting (for beginners)

Before listing the available BBC buttons and their purposes, let's see how they work by imagining that we want to post some text in bold type. While we can start by clicking the B (Bold) button and typing our text between the tags it produces, it's often more practical to type the text first, highlight it and then click the button. So typing 'text', highlighting it and clicking the 'B' button should produce '[b]text[/b]', which renders as text when posted or previewed. (NB This doesn't work in Opera, which inserts the tags at the end of the post.) Subsequently highlighting '[b]text[/b]' and clicking the I (Italicized) button will produce '[i][b]text[/b][/i]', which not only renders as text when posted or previewed but also introduces the concept of nesting, which means that each new set of tags in a case like this should be seen as a new 'box' containing both the original text and any tags already applied to it.

Note that the BBC tags can also be typed and edited direct instead of clicking the buttons.

Additional Options

The following options appear by default in our forum:

Return to this topic. Attach: Allowed file types: txt, jpg, gif, pdf, mpg, png Maximum attachment size allowed: 128 KB shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview

Return to this topic

Check this to return to the topic (instead of the message index) after posting.

Attachments

If enabled, this feature allows you to attach files to your posts in much the same way as most email clients, so you simply have to browse to the relevant file(s) on your computer before clicking Post. Please note that:

• The permitted file types are: gif, jpg, pdf, png, txt, zip, tar, tgz.
• The attachements size restrictions are:
  • Max attachment size per post: 192 KB
  • Max size per attachment: 128 KB
  • Max number of attachments per post: 4

References

SMF Bulletin Board Code

Tag Name	Button	Code	Output	Comments
Bold		[b]bold[/b]	bold	*
Italicized		[i]italicized[/i]	italicized	*
Underline		[u]underline[/u]	underline	*
Insert List		[list] [li]SMF[/li] [li]YaBB SE[/li] [/list]	SMF YaBB SE	While you can add as many items as you wish, each item must be contained by the correct opening and closing tags. You can also style your list item bullets with special opening tags and no closing tags, but this option doesn't currently output valid XHTML.
		[list] [o]circle [O]circle [0]circle [*]disc [@]disc [+]square [x]square [#]square [/list]	circle circle circle disc disc square square square
Insert Image		[img] http://somesite/image.gif [/img]		Type the width and height attributes to resize the image.
		[img width=48 height=48] http://somesite/image.gif [/img]
Insert Hyperlink		[url]http://somesite/[/url]	http://somesite/	NB the 'url' tag opens in a new window, but you can type 'iurl' tags to open in the same window.
		[url=http://somesite/] descriptive link [/url]	descriptive link
Insert Email		[email] someone@somesite [/email]	someone@somesite	*
Insert Quote		[quote]quote[/quote]	quote	Note the optional 'author' attribute.
		[quote author=author]quote[/quote]	quote
Font Color	Change Color Black Red Green Orange Purple Blue	[color=Red]red[/color]	red	Select the color from the drop-down.
Code Highlighting	Code Syntax Actionscript Apache Log AppleScript Bash C C++ C# CSS Diff DOS Genero HTML4 Strict Java Javascript Per Shell SQL XML #other syntax	[code=php]echo 'Hello World!';[/code]	Code (php) echo 'Hello World';	Select the code syntax from the drop-down.

[Attach:]

Return to this topic.