I just thought to write a basic forum guide, for any members that have trouble doing things on the forum.

Sorry, I had accidently posted this before fully written. If you have viewed it now - there is more to come!

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Basic Coding
things such as inserting pictures, strike though/bold/italic/underline/colour/quote etc will all follow this code "rule"
Basic forum coding will start like either of these
This is called BB code, which just about all forums use.

Code [b] [i] [u] [s] [url] [mail] [img]

And End the same as the start, but a forward slash after the bracket.

Code [/b] [/i] [/u] [/s]

Resulting in something like this
Bold text

Code [b]Bold text[/b]

Only the text inside the codes will be affected. Codes such as these are incorrect.

Code [b]Bold Text[b] ... [b][/b] this text is coloured ...

This is how it should be done, as you will see, the "/" was missing from the ending code.

Code [b]Bold Text[/b]

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Inserting images

Inserting images uses the same code as before, but with "IMG". You will need an image URL to do this, which you can get by uploading your images to a hosting site such as http://www.photobucket.com.

Code [img]www.photobucket.com/example.gif[/img]

This is a correct example of an image code.

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Colour text

Colour isn't needed much, but heres how to colour your text anyway.
The start colour code is

Code [colour=red/purple/blue/green/yellow/orange]

And the end is

Code [/colour]

Insert the text you would like coloured in between the two colour codes.

URL linking

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Inserting a normal URL will automatically turn into a link. Which will display the url like so
http://www.animalloversweb.com
But, of you want to tidy things up a bit, with a text anchor link (not as complicated as it sounds!), here.
Using thread code, a URL code is this, and a text anchor link below.

Code Here is a URL code. [URL] and the ending is [/URL]. For a  normal link, the URL would just go between the starting [URL] code and the ending [/URL] code. A text anchor link code will look like this [URL=http://YOUR URL HERE]YOUR TEXT HERE[/URL] [URL=http://www.animalloversweb.com]Animal Website[/URL]

The code above will end up looking like this.

Animal Website

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Extras
Extra bits such as text size/font/strike/italic etc all work the same way, just with different code. And don't worry, you don't need to memorize all the codes.

If you would like to do more than one effect on a piece of text, such as size and colour, this is the format.

Code [color=blue][size=14]Example[/size][/color]

Which will create this
Example


As you can see at the top of when you post, there are some icons. Highlight the text you want code around then click the icon of your choice. Here is a diagram of what all the different icons do, even if some of them say it on it anyway :p.

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I hope the tutorial helps some of you, and if you need help just ash me, the moderators or the admin.  

Thats a very helpful post Laura, i bet it will help allot of new members  

Now I know what you've been up to all evening  .  That's really useful, well done

Very helpful!!  It took me awhile on the other board I'm on to figure everything out.....  thank you for the info.

Thanks Laura that is really helpful.

I would just add that when adding tags to get an effect using the toolbar buttons, if applying more than one effect e.g. make text larger AND coloured:

You should select the text that you want to apply the first change to i.e.  size, then for the second change select the text again including the size tags before applying the colour tags otherwise the colour tags both end up at the beginning instead the opening tag at the beginning and the closing tag at the end and this is what you would get:

Code [colour][/colour]LARGER TEXT

There is quite a lot of this happening on the forum at the  moment, so just to recap to avoid this select everything that you want to apply an effect to before clicking the button to apply the tags to create that effect.

well done laura im sure that will help alot of people.

[url]animalloversweb]ol[/url]

Thanks everybody . John, I've just added a bit about that now, thank you for reminding me .

Ya know,  for some reason I find this forum much easier to do things on than most. I am glad to have found this forum!

Thanks Laura! Thats a great guide, that will help out the new members for sure!

Thank you. That is very helpful to both me and other people.