Site Features

Here is a general guide to features.

Control Panel: you will find the control panel in the login block.

Under the control menu you will find three different folders: My Settings, My Modules, and Site Content.

My Settings has five areas: change my password, change my view,
personal comment settings, set my bulletin board preferences, set my language.

Change my password is pretty self explanatory. You can modify your password and your email address associated with your account.

Change my view allows you to select which theme you want to view the site with. Currently there are three themes: lasse (which is the default, this green one), amph which is a full width theme with amphibians, and borkenkaefer which is a black and white theme. li>
Personal comment settings allows you to set how you view comments in the forum. You can view them oldest first or newest first and you can see the postings as threaded, nested or flat.

Bulletin Board Preferences allows you to set an avatar or link to an offsite image for your postings. You can also notate where you live and can create a signature for your postings there.

My Modules contains the notes control panel.

Notes If you have a new note, you will receive a notice under the login panel. If you do not have any new notes, you will need to enter notes from the "My Modules" section and then click on "My Notes" to read old ones. If you have a new note, all notes will appear when you click to view that one. when you log on any new notes will be notated below your login block.
NOTES ARE ALWAYS PRIVATE AND NEVER MONITORED BY GmBA.

Site Content performs the same function as clicking on the forums tab under the menu block on any screen.

Creating New Forum Topics

In the upper left hand corner you will see a section entitled Site Menu. The second link down is Forums. Click on that link.
Scroll down the forums and decide which one you want to create a topic. Then click on the name of that forum and it will take you to a new page showing all the threads under that topic.
On the new page you will see two sections in the middle of the page. The top one is Search Bulletin Board. The next one is Forum Topics. You will then see three columns below that. The first one is Topic, then Replies, then Last Post. Immediately above where it says Topic there is a link that says New Topic. Click on that.
Name your topic thread.
Create the content for your thread.

Forum Features

I was hoping that those of you that post photos could resize them prior to posting the code. Here are some brief instructions:

A. In Photobucket.com click on "edit",

B. then "resize",

C. "preset sizes",

D. select "320x240" or smaller,

E. and select "Replace Original".

Please remember when posting on the forum to use the second from the bottom code entitled: "HTML Code".

I have noticed that some of you are not clear on how to bold, center, underline, etc. items.

A. You need to click on the command first.

B. And then you will see some HTML code (some letters, words, or info in-between a "greater than" and "less than symbol")

C. and you will see something like "Bold Text" or "Centered Text" in the middle. What you then need to do is to replace that text with whatever info you want in bold, underlined or indented, centered, etc.

I also wanted to advise that when you are finished with your posting, if you want you can click on the tab all the way to the right "SP" and that will open a "Spell Check" window. That might save some of you some grief.

A. To correct something you need to first click on the "?" next to the word you want to change.

B. You will then select the word you want to use as a replacement and click on "Select"

C. When you are finished with checking the post click on "Done" on the bottom left hand corner and you are finished.

Using Avatars

To use Avatars/Photos I like to use www.photobucket.com . It has click and copy codes and has a function to create avatars.

To use photographs you must first use a photo editing program on your computer to resize your photograph to no more than 60 pixels by 60 pixels in size with the file being not more than 6 kb's. You then just need to post the picture to your Photobucket account and click the "Direct Link" code below the picture. Then you just need to paste that code into the URL link box in the Avatar section found in the control panel under the Bulletin Board Settings section.

With avatars you create on Photobucket you can get them in a variety of sizes, just pick one close to the right size.