Registering & Using the Message Board

When you're logged in ..... in the top right corner you'll see ... Your Name, Users and Log out.

Click on Your Name .... You're taken to your editable profile page where you can add an avatar, make your email address available and other things that will show on your profile page. If you select the "make your email address available" option ..... it shows up as an envelope icon beside your name. People can click on that to send an email to you.

So .... it's up to the individual members to make their email addresses available.

Am I suposed to fill out the profile page? Right now Iam hopelessly confused, I guess I'm a slow learner and a bit of a techno phobe>

Just noticed that if you click on the envelope next to someone's name a window pops up to send a private e-mail WITHOUT giving the sendee's e-mail address.
That means only registered members can e-mail you.
It just gets better and better!

Just trying out putting in a video of where I live.

Unfortunately YouTube seems to no longer work as easily as it used to with my Message Board's "flash" video posting feature since they changed to a new type of coding a few years back, so to embed videos from YouTube we must do it manually by clicking Share (Compartir) on the YouTube website to get a code that looks like this:

https://youtu.be/h0dnUTaRT5k

Then using the code for the video in bold text above insert it into the working code that looks like the code below. You'll have to remove the space after the first bracket and before the last bracket to make it work.

[ flash width=560 height=315]https://www.youtube.com/v/h0dnUTaRT5k?fs=1&hl=en_US[/flash ]

If your video is on a different service other than YouTube the process might not work. If your flash movie (with the extension .swf) is on a different server besides YouTube (yours or someone else's) and you know the URL of the file then you may be able to use the "Custom flash video" option and size it to your liking.

Tags:
how to, post, insert, include, videos

Photos and other images can easily be included when posting or editing a message by clicking on the button to the right of the text field that says "image", then select "default" referring to the placement of the image. You can use the "Preview" option to see the appearance of your message before actually posting it. If you want the image to be located to the right or left of your text choose one of those options. Since I don't allow images to be uploaded to my website, the "thumbnail" options don't work.

TIP - You can also paste the image URL into your message first, highlight it (select it by holding down your mouse button down while dragging the cursor over the URL so that it turns blue) and THEN click the "image" button to the right and it will automatically insert the correct code to make an image from your URL.

You can include multiple images in your message by simply repeating the process.

Image files used on the internet will usually end in one of the following file types: .jpg (most common for photos), .png, .gif, or .bmp.

To include a photo or other image file in your message the image file must be already on the internet and accessible to the general public. You cannot link to an image file in your computer. There are many free photo sharing services where you can upload your image files for sharing with the public. Even Facebook and some cloud services will work. The photo just needs an online URL.

Be sure you link to the image file itself and not the webpage if you want a particular image to show in your message. If you want to link to the webpage where a photo or image is located then use the "link" option, not the "image" option.

To see the full URL (web address and file name) for any image file (except Shockwave/Flash and other video/movie files) on a PC you can usually right-click on the image in your browser and "Open image in new tab". On a Mac it depends on the browser, but usually you can open up a new tab and drag the image into the new tab and its URL will appear in the address bar, or else press Ctrl and click the image and select "View Image", then copy the URL from your browser). Highlight and copy the URL and paste it into the field for the "Optional Image Link". If it's a photo and the URL you have does not end in one of the file types mentioned above then it probably isn't the correct URL (unless the file type ".jpg" or similar precedes a question mark "?" followed by some other characters, in which case it will probably work). Some web services don't allow hot-linking (linking to photos from their websites) in which case you have to use the "link" option to link to the page itself where the photo is in order to share it.

Besides Twitter and Facebook, three good free photosharing services where you can upload and share your photos from are:

• http://imgur.com/
  
• http://imageshack.com/
  
• http://photobucket.com/

The Site Search Engine searches the rest of my website including the old Message Board Archives, but not within the new forum. The forum search feature only searches within this new forum.

Our man with the plan Scott has added a cool translation tool for both Spanish and English. To use this feature look in the lower right-hand corner of any message and click on the respective language link and the translated message will appear.

This feature is currently only available for individual messages in "Thread view", not "Table view".

Hi Rob,
I forgot my password and received a new one from the board but I want to change it to something I can remember well, try to remember! How is it that done?
Many Thanks,
Maggie

If you don't log in for over 6 months your account will be cancelled and you'll have to register again, so please remember to at least log in once in a while.

Rob is there any possibility that you could/would put a "Back to the forum index" link after the last of each thread's replies? Some of the threads have so many that they extend for nearly an entire screen, and it would be much quicker for readers to click said link...

One way to keep up with the latest posts is to select "Order by date of last reply" on the Message Board toolbar (the darker arrow will point down when this is selected). The Default is "Order by date of post" (with the darker arrow pointing up), so if you haven't changed it just click on it one time and see what is currently being discussed.

In case you never noticed, the Order control has two settings. Default is the messages appear in the order they were posted by date. The second option is the messages appear in the order of the most recent posting (my personal favorite).

The first setting is boring for me. You will miss a lot of what is going on even though the sidebar lists the ten most recent posts.

The second setting lets you keep up with all the active messages, even if someone replies to a message that is three months old.

Lots of folks using English keyboards ask how to type using accent marks. Of course there are several workarounds such as using the Character Map tool on PCs running Windows. However, Tony from Vancouver posted a helpful link (attaboy Tony!) that I thought would be a good idea to preserve here where it can be more easily found.

Holdkey is an easy-to-use freeware program that you might find useful: http://www.holdkey.eu/

Some brave folks use little photos of themselves when they post. Problem is they're too small to really see what they look like. Is there some way to enlarge the photos, if only to avoid them should we run into each other on the street?

I am a new member. How do I post a question?

So, RW, how do we quote a post for inserting in our own thread? I know how to do that but usually there is just a button. Am I missing it?

Does anyone know a way to dig up posts that (I) made in the past? "my board posts" etc?

I'm ashamed to say I can't figure out how to indent when I'm copying and pasting from another post. Everyone else seems to be able to but I can't. My tab key doesn't seem to work here. Could it be that Chrome is the villain?

It's driving me crazy.