A Short Tour of These Forums

[Tarot_Redhand]

This little tour will hopefully make it easier for folks, either new to these forums or those just unsure about them, to find their way around. My aim here is not to explain the reasonably obvious but more to show what is not immediately so. I will also explain how to achieve some common things that some people had trouble finding before. Starting at the top right of the screen -

From left to right the magnifying glass are these forums search facility, the three stacked horizontal lines are what is known as a “Hamburger Menu” (underlined in red) and lastly your avatar. The above picture also shows part of what is revealed when you click on your avatar that you may not have noticed as you logged out. The three things revealed are, from left to right again, bookmarks, messages and settings. I’ll deal with these later. Clicking on the hamburger menu icon reveals -

When you click on the reply button for a post/message it reveals the editor -

This may seem a bit minimal at first glance and not quite what you are used to. Just like the BeamDog forums you can enter markdown code, bbcode or elements of html to further format the text that you are entering. In this picture I have underlined two things in red. The thing at the top right of this picture allows you to re-size the edit window as a whole. Just click and hold this then move your mouse forwards or backwards to do so. For now that just leaves another menu. What you do get from the menu above the the text entry area is as follows (L - R) - Quote the whole of a post (often wasteful of space), Bold, Italic, link, Anonymous Block Quote, Pre-formatted text, upload (for images etc.), bullet list, Numbered list, (lots of) Emojis and a little menu. Opening this menu looks like -

Now that you know where to look makes it easier to explain about things. I’ll start with your avatar. When you have an account created for these forums you are assigned the first letter of your user-name for an avatar. To change this you need to go into settings using the cog/gear icon underneath your current avatar at the top of the screen. The initial page that opens when you click that icon is where you change your avatar. If this is your first time looking here it is a good idea to have a good look around because there is a lot of information there.

Inserting images into a post. There are 2 ways to do this other than clicking on the icon in the editor menu. If the image is on your computer, just position you text cursor where you want the image to appear, then drag and drop the image into the editing window. If, on the other hand, the image is somewhere on the web you will need to right-click on the image and copy the image address to your clipboard. Next position your cursor where you want the image to appear in your post and paste the address there. In both cases you should see the image appear in the preview window to the right of the edit window.

You can also add a small version of a YouTube video to a post. For this you need to copy the page address (copy from the address bar at the top of your browser) of the YouTube page containing the video. Position your text cursor in the editing window at the place you want the video to appear. Paste the address there and Discourse will do the rest. Example -

Aurora Toolset 01

Having introduced them, there are a few things to know about links on here. Aside from the usual method (highlight text in message, click link icon and enter url) you can if you want, just enter/paste an address on its own into your message. Doing so will produce one of two effects. Discourse will first test the address. If it finds some information at the address that you entered, it will create a box with fuzzy edges. This box will contain a small amount of information about the web page your are linking to as well as the link (an example).

The Alchemist's Letter by Carlos Andre Stevens | Short Film

If Discourse cannot find this information, it just turns the address into the link itself. One other thing. Occasionally you may want to reference a long dead website without Discourse turning it into a link. The way to do this is not immediately obvious but it can be done and is rather simple when you know how. First enter the address and then highlight it. Now click the pre-formatted text button on the editor menu. That’s it. The result looks like this - nwn.bioware.com.

Quoting. Apart from the methods already mentioned there is another way to quote text from somebody else’s post(s). Now this can get quite “interesting” depending on your browser. Highlight the text that you want to quote, using your mouse to do so. When you release your mouses button a little box should appear with the word “quote” in it. Click this box. If you haven’t started a post yet, one will be created for you. In the post that you are creating the text you are quoting along with additional information and some formatting code will appear. If you look in the preview window you will see that not only is the text quoted but the user-name of the person who’s text you are quoting also appears. Remember I mentioned that your browser could make this “interesting”? I use Opera and it has a normally useful feature. It also pops up a little box when you highlight text on a web page, this one offering to search/copy. Needless to say when these boxes overlap…

PMs (Personal/Private Messages). The easiest way is to click on the user name of the person you want to message. Doing so will bring up a box that has (amongst a few other things) a button marked “Message” in it. Click that button to start writing your message. If you can’t see their user-name anywhere don’t despair. Open the hamburger menu I mentioned near the start of this post. You will see an item marked “Users”. Click on that. This will bring up a list of ALL registered users of these forums. That could take a bit of time. Alternatively, if you can remember their user name you could use the search facility mentioned at the start of this post.

Posting code. Enter your code into the edit box and ignore the way it will mangle your layout. Highlight your code and press the pre-formatted text button. This (should) not only restore your layout when you actually post your message it may also place your code into a box with scroll bars if Discourse deems your code too big to properly show in a post. These boxes are no different to the ones the used to be found on the old ign vault and the old nwn.bioware.com sites. Well I say no different. Discourse’s box is actually bigger than what you used to get on either of those sites.

Now you may well have noticed that this post is pinned. Now on discourse pinning works differently to how you are probably used to. Once you have read the whole of a thread it will become unpinned for you but not others until they have also read that thread to the end. If you want to keep this thread handy after that, you will need to press the [bookmark] button below. Doing that will mean that you can always come back here.

Hopefully this helps. Obviously, Any questions about these threads, post them here. Also, as I not really “the fount of all knowledge” I may have left something out that you think is important. If so post in this thread. I may even have made an error (I’ve tried not to obviously). Post a correction in here, please.

TR

[Tarot_Redhand]

Forgot to mention. There is another way that Discourse is different to most other forums. On other forums, when there are a lot of posts in a thread, that thread is split over 2 or more pages. On Discourse a thread is a continuous series of posts. There are no pages to step through, you can read the whole of a thread from start to finish on a single page.

Obviously there has to be a downside. With PMs there is a hard limit of 500 posts to a thread. As there has yet to be an ordinary thread of this size I can only surmise but I suspect that such a limit also applies to these as well.

TR

[thirdmouse]

@Tarot_Redhand

On Discourse a thread is a continuous series of posts. There are no pages to step through, you can read the whole of a thread from start to finish on a single page.

Continuous scroll can have its own irritations with trying to get (back) to a specific point or just not having a “feel” for where you are in the thread, so it might also be worth mentioning that (on desktop) to the right of the thread content there is a little scroll slider thing that you can use to bounce to a different spot in a long thread.

You can also click the date at the top/bottom of that slider, or press Home / End on your keyboard to skip straight to the first/last post instead of scrolling.

[Tarot_Redhand]

@thirdmouse

so it might also be worth mentioning that (on desktop)

You just did

TR

[kamal]

Will this short tour take three hours and wind up with internet via coconut?

[rjshae]

I think if you have JavaScript disabled (as I do on my iPad), it switches to pagination past a certain length.

[Tarot_Redhand]

One thing I forgot. Clicking on the vault graphic at the top of the page usually takes you back to the front page of these forums. I say usually because it sometimes takes you back to the top of the thread you are reading instead. In such a case, clicking on it a second time will take you to the front page.

TR

[Tarot_Redhand]

This is an update about posting code in here. While the method I previously outlined will preserve your layout it does nothing for code highlighting. Fortunately there are two methods to use for that. Both methods produce identical output. So let’s start with code that you post without using any method at all -

if (GetItemCursedFlag(OBJECT_SELF) == TRUE)
{
AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
AssignCommand(oPC, ActionEquipItem(OBJECT_SELF, INVENTORY_SLOT_NECK));
SendMessageToPC(oPC, “You cannot unequip this item - it’s cursed!”);
}

Now just using the pre-formatted text button gives you -

if (GetItemCursedFlag(OBJECT_SELF) == TRUE)
{
	AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
	AssignCommand(oPC, ActionEquipItem(OBJECT_SELF, INVENTORY_SLOT_NECK));
	SendMessageToPC(oPC, "You cannot unequip this item - it's cursed!");
}

OK. Now for method 2. To use this method you need to enclose your code between [code] and [/code] like this -

[code]
if (GetItemCursedFlag(OBJECT_SELF) == TRUE)
{
	AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
	AssignCommand(oPC, ActionEquipItem(OBJECT_SELF, INVENTORY_SLOT_NECK));
	SendMessageToPC(oPC, "You cannot unequip this item - it's cursed!");
}
[/code]

which gives you -

if (GetItemCursedFlag(OBJECT_SELF) == TRUE)
{
	AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
	AssignCommand(oPC, ActionEquipItem(OBJECT_SELF, INVENTORY_SLOT_NECK));
	SendMessageToPC(oPC, "You cannot unequip this item - it's cursed!");
}

The final method involves less typing. For this you enclose your code with ``` both before and after it. Note that those are single back quote symbols and not the ordinary single quotes.

```

as opposed to

‘’’

Entering this with your code should look something like -

```
if (GetItemCursedFlag(OBJECT_SELF) == TRUE)
{
	AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
	AssignCommand(oPC, ActionEquipItem(OBJECT_SELF, INVENTORY_SLOT_NECK));
	SendMessageToPC(oPC, "You cannot unequip this item - it's cursed!");
}
```

which should result in -

if (GetItemCursedFlag(OBJECT_SELF) == TRUE)
{
	AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
	AssignCommand(oPC, ActionEquipItem(OBJECT_SELF, INVENTORY_SLOT_NECK));
	SendMessageToPC(oPC, "You cannot unequip this item - it's cursed!");
}

TR

[Tarot_Redhand]

The people at Discourse have finally got around to creating a new user’s guide to using Discourse (the system these forums use). It is to be found in this blog entry.

TR

[Tarot_Redhand]

Beware. Because Discourse tries to be helpful and prettify what you type in, it is essential that when you post code on here you format the text of your code as mentioned above. If you don’t do that Discourse will change your ordinary straight quotation marks into the “prettier” unicode version where they slope in opposite directions at each end of the text between them. The toolset compiler does not like these fancy quotation marks one little bit and your code will throw out errors if it finds them. One thing to note is that you can do the code formatting after you’ve pasted it and it will fix the problem.

TR

[Tarot_Redhand]

I recently tried an experiment in a pm and discovered something interesting. I then tried the same thing in a regular post and it didn’t work. Which is why I can’t show you an example of this discovery in here. So what have I found out? Just that in pm’s it is not just images that you can drag and drop to have them show in your post. You can also drag and drop short sound files that are either in wav format or mp3. They look like this

in a thread and play.

TR

[Tarot_Redhand]

Just literally found this out in the last 24 hours. Did you realise that Discourse (this forum software) comes complete with a set of keyboard shortcuts? It didn’t occur to me. Then I saw a retweet on Discourse’s twitter feed. What I found out is that to obtain a full list of all these shortcuts you just need to type -

?

Now depending on your keyboard you may need to type two keys simultaneously such as with a UK keyboard you will need to press both [shift] and ? at the same time, just as you would when typing in a post. For obvious reasons this doesn’t work when you have an edit box (where you type stuff in) in use. In this latter case just click anywhere outside the box to get the list. Then when you’ve found the shortcut you want just click in the edit box to continue composing your post. For me the list looks like -

TR

[kevL_s]

a little thing to get preformatted text (not code per se)

<pre>
preformatted text
</pre>

eg →

table1 col1 col2
1      2    3
4      5    6

[kevL_s]

to escape (bypass) forum format tags, put a backslash before the tag

• dash without backslash in front

- dash with backslash in front

[kevL_s]

to insert extra vertical whitespace into a post (more than the standard paragraph break) insert non-breaking space(s)

this is line 1
&nbsp;
this is line 2

or an html line-break

this is line 1
<br>
this is line 2

 
note that the line-break leaves a bigger vertical space

[Tarot_Redhand]

Or you can highlight the text that is formatted and click on the pre-formatted text button - ‘</>’ - just after the quotation button in the tools above the edit box when creating a post. One other thing. Because you can use markdown codes when editing, you can create a table on the fly.

| Syntax      | Description |
| ----------- | :-----------: |
| Header      | Title       |
| Paragraph   | Text        |

will create -

Syntax	Description
Header	Title
Paragraph	Text

More information can be found on the Extended Syntax page of the Markdown Guide website where the above example was copied from.

TR