This thread is planned to be a place to share useful tidbits of information about the Portal and its features. After all, such a site does not come with a big manual but rather with small helps here and there and other things that are not as obvious.
While some of the information may seem obscure, the intention of this thread is not to find ways to hack the Portal or anything. If you know a way to make your texts in the forum more beautiful, that is alright. But if you wish to explore how to read the PM of other people, please do not even bother looking here.
Another important aspect is that people have varying knowledge about such sites. Therefore, if you post any information and your post contains several items, please try to put some easily visible markers so that people can easily identify where a section they do not need to re-read ends, and a new, maybe more interesting section starts.
So, I will start with some of the things I noticed or things that some users have had trouble with in the past:
The difference between the Sentbox and the Outbox
When you check your private messages, you will notice that there are 4 sections:
Inbox
Sentbox
Outbox
Savebox
Inbox is quite obvious and similar to e-mail hosts and the savebox also has the obvious function of storing messages you wish to store, but why is there both a sentbox and an outbox?
The answer is quite simple and it can be useful to know at times:
When you send a private message, it will first be stored in your outbox.
Once the recipient of that message reads it for the first time, your copy of the message is moved from the outbox to the sentbox.
In other words, you can see whether a message has been read by checking whether it is in the sentbox or outbox, which can be useful if you have a friend who seldom visits the Portal, for instance.
Searching for a Member's Forum Posts
This is a rather useful shortcut which is probably becoming a bit evasive due to the two profile/pseudo profiles users have.
When you look at the profile of a member (by clicking on their name or on the profile button below any of their forum posts), you will see that there are some statistics about their posts, in the section Total posts:
Just at the end of that information, there is a small link called Find all posts by XXX, "XXX" being the member name. By clicking on this link, you directly and without any typing start a search for all posts by that member on the forums, sorted as usual from the latest to the oldest.
This can be very useful if you encounter someone on the forums for the first time and are puzzled by something they say. You can use the function to see what they said in the past and then maybe better understand their thoughts or their habits of speech. Thus, it can help avoid misunderstandings.
On a more shady note, it also makes it rather easy to check whether people were recently active on the forums if you are wondering about people dodging humiliating discussions. I mention this, because it means that if you post on the forums, even if it is in a place no one would suspect, you leave an easily followable trace.
Basics: BBCode
This is not really an obscure feature per se, but it is something new members sometimes have problems with, which is why I think it should be explained a little bit in detail.
BBCode are special tags you use for formatting your posts in the forums and your PM. They used to work in the gallery's descriptions as well, but there have been some problems after the most recent changes.
A BBCode tag always consists of a command surrounded by square brackets, for instance [b]. Many come in pairs marking a certain space within a text. For instance, the beginning of this paragraph actually reads like this:
A [b]BBCode tag[/b] always consists of a command
The easiest tags are the ones for bold face, underlining, and italics, and when you below the subject box when you write or edit a post, you will find short cut buttons for them and others.
I have to admit that I never use the short cuts, so I would rather not delve into their working, but there is one very useful feature: if you hover over a shortcut button with your mouse, just above the text box, you will see what the actual tags look like.
The interesting tags are the more complex ones, [quote] and [url].
[quote] is actually a weird one as it has an important shortcut in addition to the buttons above.
If you look at a post, or more specifically, in its upper right corner, you will see a button called quote. When you push that button, two very important things happen:
1. You automatically reply to the post, so you do not need to press the reply button.
2. In the text box, the text of the original post will already be there, surrounded by [quote] tags, so if you have just that single text and want to quote it in a single block, you do not need to do any more.
Deathworks wrote:This here is a quote starting with [quote="Deathworks"], that is, the elaborate variant of the quote tag. Closing tag is the normal [/quote].
This here is a quote starting with the simple variant [quote]. Closing tag is the normal [/quote] here as well.
As you can see, non-contradictory tags can be combined.
The [url] tag similarly also has two variants for its opening tag.
The simple version would be just [url], which must be followed by the url you wish to link to, and after that the closing tag ([/url]).
http://aryion.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=18
As you can see, the link is displayed as the link address. The above line looks as follows in code:
http://aryion.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=18
But there is also an elaborate variant, where you put the address into the opening tag like this:
General Forum
The above line reads as follows:
General Forum
As you can see, the address is in the opening tag, and the link is displayed as whatever is between the opening and the end tag.
Closing Comment
I think that should be enough for a short start. If you have any other information you think could be useful for users of the Portal, please feel free to share that information here in this thread.
Also, if you have additional information about something posted in the thread or wish to correct something, please do respond here so that everyone can benefit.
Deathworks