There's a couple of features here at genvibe that I really likeSearch feature the handiest thing here to find info. Sometimes it's hard to come up with the right thing to search for. The recent searches shows how active the search tool has been for the last couple hours, and if you want to hide what you've been searching for, search for something else, if you're logged in it doesn't remember your prior searches, only the most recent. You can use an asterisk (*) at the end of the word to search for and the search will return any threads that have any words that begin with the letters to the left of the asterisk. So, if you searched for "birt*", it would return both "birth day" and "birthday" If you just searched for "birth", you wouldn't get the threads that only had "birthday" It is a good idea to try to search for something before starting a new thread, because the answer to your quesion may have laready been posted, and continuing the previous thread helps consolidate the information, making it easier for other people to find.Active Threads I use the active threads link (
http://forums.genvibe.com/zero...reads }more than the individual forums. Great to see what people are talking about, what's new in the last 24 hours. see
http://forums.genvibe.com/zerothread?id=9279Active Users - This link at the top right of each page (next to Search) will show you which users have been active in the past 30 minutes. Each user listed may have done a number of things, but only the most recent action is listed for each active user. If you are really watching to see who is doing what, this function can help. It will show you when people read or edit a post or forum, edit their profile, start new topics, reply to topics. It will also report any new users that have registered in the last 30 minutes. This appears to be the data that the forum software uses to display Online or Offline under a user's avatar in a thread. If you see Online under someone's avatar, then that means that they have been logged in within the last 30 minutes. If it says Offline, that means that the user has not done anything on the forum for the past 30 minutes. If you're really in to it, you can switch back and forth between Active Threads and Active users, and keep really good track of who is doing what right now.Member List Interesting to look in the Member list. Can search for "users" sorted by signup date in descending order to see who's new, or in ascending order to see who's been around the longest. Clicking on an individual member shows their stats. You can also see a members full stats by clicking on their username above their avatar in a thread.Edit Sometimes if I want to test something, like seeing which html tags the forum software tolerates and which ones it rejects, I'll go to an old post and edit it instead of creating a new topic in the testing forum.. lets me figure it out without being visible. My Profile I like being able to set preferences in User Options. I have it set to display "All" threads in a forum, and no inline pictures. The No in line pics used to help with my pitiful dialup connection, but now I have broadband and it's glorious, so I now have it set to display pictures. DELETE If you replied to a topic, and then either wanted to erase it completely for whatever reason, you can edit the post, and then instead of hitting the SAVE button to post the changed version, you can hit the DELETE button, which will delete your post. This doesn't work if it's the first post in a topic. Also, if the post had an attachment, such as an image, then the image gets deleted when you delete the post.Thread Symbols When in a forum, some threads may have little symbols next to the thread title. These symbols do not show up in search results, which includes the active threads list. This forum uses the following symbols: - ATTACHMENT A thread with this symbol has at least one post with a file attachment, some file that a user has uploaded to the forum. - STICKY A thread with this symbol will always be displayed at the top of the forum. Only an admin or moderator can make a thread sticky. It is a way to keep important threads at the top so they are easier to find - POLL A thread with this symbol has a poll, where members can vote only once, and must be logged in to vote. - PICTURE A thread with this symbol has an image in at least one of the the threads, the image is posted in such a way that it will be displayed when the thread is displayed (subject to your user preferences) - LOCK A thread with this symbol can not be posted to. If you view the thread and are logged in, there are no "Reply" buttons () Like STICKY, only an admin or moderator can lock a thread. The Posting Rules in the Vibe Lounge is an example of a locked thread.A thread may have several symbols associated with it. The two most common are ATTACHMENT and IMAGE, then threads with a POLL. Threads with STICKY and LOCK are relatively uncommon.-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Special Bonus Section - Post Composition TipsIn addition to using the bold, italic, underline, url and image functions that there are buttons for in the post creating/edit window, there are some text formatting tricks for this forum's software that can be used to dress up a post, or do some things that are not obvious. Quote When you reply to someone, you can hit the quote button ( ) and their entire post will be included in your reply. This can help people identify exactly what you are replying to, especially in a thread that has several different conversations going on, or if there have been several posts since the one that you want to reply to. When you hit the quote button, the quoted text will have tags around it, like [QUOTE=member]quoted text here[/QUOTE]. (member will be the username of the person that you are replying to) If you want, you can edit that, or delete it, which can be useful if you want to highlight something that wasn't really include in a previous post in the thread. You can also edit the quoted text, perhaps to only quote a small part of the reply, to highlight exactly what you are repllying to. As a quote example, if I put [QUOTE="an incredibly wise person"]You should read your owners manual and also search for previous topics before starting a new one[/QUOTE] in a post, it will look like this:Quote, originally posted by an incredibly wise person »You should read your owners manual and also search for previous topics before starting a new oneShow Syntax A lot of the tags here are the same as or similar to standard HTML tags. However, if you want to explain to someone here how to format their post to get the desired results, when you type in the correct syn
tax the software interprets it, and the other person can't easily see what you typed. The trick (stolen from Nova) is to use a pair of tags to break up the tag that you want to show. For example, the image tags are [IMG]
http://url.for.image[/IMG] but to get the [ and ] characters to show up with IMG between them, I actually put a bold/endbold pair of tags after the [ and before the IMG], like [B>>IMG] and [B>>/IMG]. URLs If you want to provide a link to some other web page, you can put the URL between
and tags. If you want to provide the URL but have it show up as a more descriptive title, you can use the advanced URL feature of
Descriptive title. An example of this would be "Have you tried the
Search Feature yet?". it would look like "Have you tried the Search Feature yet?"Bullets Bullets are the black dots like the one over there to the left of the word "Bullets" Create these with the list item tag, LI> A bullet always starts on a new line.Indent You can indent a paragraph by using the UL> tag. To end an indented section, use an "end indent" tag, /UL>. You can indent multiple times by having multiple indent tags, just be sure to use the same number of end indent tags to get back to the left margin.Text Color You can have your text show up in a different color if you want. To make the text red, put it between color tags, which look like
this text would look red You can use lots of different colors by their common (english) name, such as blue, red, green, yellow, gray, etc, or if you understand such things, you can use a hexadecimal RGB value, such as #005000, which should be a darker green than you get with using just the word greenWarning: Extensive use of colors can be distracting and it should be used only as required for emphasis, or people will hate youIt is also a good idea to use a color that can be easily read, for example the following line is written in a very bad color to use here, and you will only be able to see it if you "select" the text.Congratulations, you know how to select text in your web browser!Text Size You can use the [size=X] [/size] tags, where X is a single digit number between 0 and 7. size=0 and size=1 give you the normal text size, size=7 is big Manually typing in a bunch of "size" tags can get pretty tedious if you want to do anything involved, but that's ok, because just like color, If you use too much size it can get very annoying and people will hate you. KiNd oF LiKe PeOpLe WhO tYpE lIkE tHiS.However, it CAN be useful to emphasize a partiular word in a sentence-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-updated 3/29/2004-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-What are your favorite genvibe features? Any tips you wish other folks knew about? Any secret genvibe tips you want to share?