Forum Features Demystified

Have a look if you are unsure about the advanced features of our forum software. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask below in a comment, and I'll add the appropriate explanation to this posting.


Forum Glossary

Activity
Own section of the forum called "Recent Activity" showing what's going on right now in a time line / Twitter feed like manner.

Breadcrumb
The click-able path at the top to the left showing where you are in the forum hierarchy.

Category / Sub-Category
Equals a forum / sub-forum in a traditional style bulletin board system.

Comment
Can mean either a public comment to a discussion, member's profile page or Activity item.

Discussion
Equals a thread in a traditional style bulletin board system.

MeBox
Your control center at the top right to your username.

Message
Equals a private message (PM) in a traditional style bulletin board system.


Types of Conversation

We have four levels of conversation opportunities here:

  1. Regular Forum Discussions: That's what you see here. Start a new new discussion with the large button in the column to the right or post a comment to an existing discussion. If you click on the arrow button right to "New Discussion" you can select "Ask a Question", which is a discussion where you can choose which comment provides the best answer to your question (the chosen comment then gets pushed to the top helping others to find it at a glance).

  2. Activity: A place for things going on right now. You can either share your thoughts directly without addressing any other member by using the text entry box at the top of the "Recent Activity" view, you can post a public comment to a member's profile page which then also shows up under Activity, or you can comment Activity items using the "Comment" link below an entry. System messages (like which members just recently joined the forum) are also shown here. Activity does not allow advanced formating, it really is just meant for sharing short public messages in a SMS / Twitter like manner.

  3. Profile Comments: Whenever you click a member's username, you get to that member's profile page. There you can leave a public comment using the text entry box above the "Add Comment" button. That comment not only gets added to the user's profile page, but also to "Recent Activity", which means it's visible to all other members and is NOT a private message!

  4. Messages: That's the private messaging system of our forum. If you want to send a PM to another (or more than one) member, either go to that member's profile page and click the "Message" button at the top, click the "Inbox" symbol (looking like an envelope) in your MeBox and then "New Message", or access your Inbox from your profile page and use the "New Message" button at the top or in the column to the right. You can address more than one member in a single message by just adding member names seperated by commas to the "Recipients" field (which does auto-completion as you type), or you can add people to an ongoing private discussion using the "Add People to this Conversation" box which shows up in the right column when viewing a private conversation. As with Activity the private messaging system is meant for short messages without advanced formating.


Placing Links in Comments

An URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown placed in a comment does not look beautiful and disrupts text flow, why not place it as proper link, like Markdown @ Wikipedia ?

Markdown supports two styles for creating links: inline and reference.
With both styles, you use square brackets to delimit the text you want to turn into a link.

Inline-style links use parentheses immediately after the link text. For example:

This is [StillDragon User Group](http://www.stilldragon.org).

Output:

This is StillDragon User Group.

Optionally, you may include a title attribute in the parentheses, which is shown when moving the mouse over the link:

This is [stilldragon.org](http://www.stilldragon.org "StillDragon User Group").

Output:

This is stilldragon.org.

Reference-style links allow you to refer to your links by names, which you define elsewhere in your document:

Our forum's most favorite announcements: [Safety Here][1] | [Safety First][2] | [Health First][3]

[1]: http://www.stilldragon.org/discussion/157/attention-your-safety-here-ttb-concerns-such "Your Safety Here"
[2]: http://www.stilldragon.org/discussion/92/safety-first-in-the-distillery                "Safety in the Distillery"
[3]: http://www.stilldragon.org/discussion/91/health-first-consuming-alcohol                "Consuming Alcohol"

Output:

Our forum's most favorite announcements: Safety Here | Safety First | Health First

The title attribute is optional. Link names may contain letters, numbers and spaces, but are not case sensitive:

Have a look at our [Activity Page][Activity]!

[activity]: http://www.stilldragon.org/activity

Output:

Have a look at our Activity Page!

Internal Linking within our Site

One very important addition to the above: The shown linking examples are supposed to show how linking works in general for links to external sites.

If linking to targets within stilldragon.org (so when referring from one discussion to another) the https://www.stilldragon.org should be omitted, because it is inserted automatically for same-site-links, making it possible to access internal links independently of the access type (HTTP or HTTPS)!

Let me show you how the first example really has to look like:

This is [StillDragon User Group](/).

Output:

This is StillDragon User Group.

Linking from one discussion to another really looks like this:

Have a look at our [recommendations on alcohol consumption](/discussion/91/health-first-consuming-alcohol)!

Output:

Have a look at our recommendations on alcohol consumption!

It will work either way, but the cleanest solution wins. ;)


Adding a Spoiler

You can hide content to be considered a spoiler by using the question-mark button in the ButtonBar above a text entry box:

image

or by entering the spoiler tag directly:

image

Output:

This is a spoiler:

Spoiler:
YOU JUST GOT SPOILED!


Our Short Cuts to Important Pages


Our Distilling Calculators Collection

https://calc.StillDragon.org


Our Manuals Collection

https://manuals.StillDragon.org


Our Advanced Forum Search

https://search.StillDragon.org


If you refer to any of these pages, please use the shown short cut URLs!

spoiler.jpg
282 x 84 - 5K
spoiled.jpg
476 x 99 - 9K

Your Place to be >>> www.StillDragon.org <<< Home of the StillDragon® Community Forum

Tagged:

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