The BASICS of an Internet-Based Forum System

First, it is probably helpful to have a cheat sheet on the terms:
A "Post" is an individual message.
A "Thread" is a string of messages (or "posts") linked together as a conversation on a particular topic. If you are reading a thread and wish to reply with your own post, just click the 'Reply' at the end of the thread, submit your message, and it will automatically be part of that thread.
A "Private Message (aka PM)" is a private message sent through the forum system, but only accessible to the sender and recipient.

In order to post in a thread, you will need to click the large black button near the top of the thread labeled 'Add Reply' or click the large black button labeled 'Qoute' near the lower right corner of an individual post to quote that message in your own post and then add to it.

To start a new topic altogether, click 'New Topic' within the relevant subforum.

When you click any of the above referenced buttons (i.e. Reply, Quote, New Topic), a Reply page will appear in which you can type to your message and then hit the 'Submit' button near the bottom.

When Replying to an existing post, one can do so by two methods:

• click the Quote button (i.e. ) in the lower right corner of the post you'd like to quote; or
• click the Add Reply button (i.e. ) in the lower left corner at the bottom of the page.

Which one is preferred?

If the conversation will naturally flow without quoting, we prefer that you simply click the Add Reply button. In this way, the previous poster's text will NOT appear in your post and will, thus, minimize the visual length of the thread.

If the conversation may be confusing to someone reading the thread or if you are responding to a specific post by another user, please use the Quote button. Ideally, it's best if you redact the portions of the quoted text that are not necessary to your reply.

While we're on the subject of Quoting within a post, let's cover it in a bit more detail.

As mentioned above, it's best to only quote the relevant portions of a previous post. In other words, it's generally considered bad form to quote 200 lines of text only to add "Me too!" or some similarly short reply.

Having determined that trimming down a quote is often desirable, let's cover how to do it properly.

1. Click the quote bottun below the post ()

2. You will see something that looks like the following:



3. Trim the quote but you *must* leave both the beginning tag and ending tag completely untouched. Note in particular that all the brackets [ and ] are important, and the ending tag has a / which also must be there to display the quote properly. In short, edit only the text between the two quote tags and your quote will come out perfectly.

As an example, here's how it would look after I removed the second line of the quote above:



And here's how it shows up inside of your post:



Here's how it would look if I messed up one of those tags:

[quote="John Smith"This is the first line of quoted text.[quote]

There are two errors with the above quote. The beginning tag is missing the ] after Smith and the ending tag is missing the /. Fix those two problems and it will appear as it does above.

And remember, if you mess up a quote, you can always immediately edit your post and fix it. Only takes a second and it will certainly be a lot more clear to the readers of your post.

Hope this helps, let us know if you have questions about it in Back Talk!

Just a reminder to only quote sections of posts that are relevant when preparing your own reply--if you can do it without quoting a previous post, please do.