About the New Board

by Scott Novick , New York, Saturday, October 11, 2008, 13:29 (698 days ago)

For those of you who liked my old board at Hotboards, this one has a lot of the features that people liked, specifically the threaded structure of the way posts display. But there are some new features here as well that I think are really cool, so I wanted to give everyone a quick rundown on how things work here at the new and improved World of B&B Board:

• Registration: Unlike my old board, as you may have noticed, you need to register here in order to post. But registration is really easy. All you have to do is click on the REGISTER link and fill in your chosen user name, email address and password (minimum 8 characters) and you're set. Email addresses are only visible to the board admin, so you don't have to worry about it being visible to spammers.
  
  
• Profiles: Want to let people know a bit about yourself besides your screen name? Or change your password? Or even set up a signature to be included in all your posts? You can do that on your profile page. To get there, all you need to do is click on your name at the top of the page when you log in, and you can change your password as well as fill in stuff like:
  - a link to an Internet home page
  - your gender
  - your location
  - your birthday
  - profile information
  - a signature block
  - time difference, if you want the board to reflect your time zone and not the board's when you log in.
  - e-mail notification settings.
  
  And the best thing about this is that all of the above is optional. So if you value your privacy, how much or how little information you include is up to you.
  
  
• Ability to receive emails from other posters: If you want to receive emails from other posters, but are worried about having your email address on display for all to see, the new board has an answer. Go into your profile and check the box below your email address that says E-mail address contactable. Once that box is checked, other posters can send you emails by clicking on the email envelope icon next to your name in any posts or in the User Area (see below). The person sending the email will not see your email address when they send it. However, when you receive it, they will of course have your address if you reply back to them.
  
  
• User Area: This link, to the right of your name at the top of the page, lets you view other registered users' profiles. Click on a user's name from the list and you can see the information they included in their profile and a link that shows all posts from that user. If the user has designated a home page or has made themselves e-mail contactable, you will see the icons for those attributes next to their names on the list.
  
  
• Thread View vs. Table View: The default view of the board is much like Hotboards, a threaded list of messages that shows how posts interconnect hierarchically. But some people like boards like Proboards or phpBB that use a traditional table format. Well, if that's your cup of tea, you can have it here, or you can switch back and forth at will. On the right side of the main forum page, right below your user name and the search box, are three links. From the default Thread View, click on Table View and POOF you change to a table view of the forum. To change back, click Thread view from Table View. And in either view, click on Fold Threads to see only the first post in each thread.
  
  
• Formatting: Hotboards used to let you use HTML to format text, but some people never got the hang of it. It's easier here, since the convenient buttons to the right of the posting box let you insert the BBCode commands this board allows. And you can even use this to hide spoilers: just highlight the spoiler text when composing the post and click on the COLOR button to change the color to white. Then, on the line before the spoiler, type something like:
  (spoiler ahead - click here and drag down to see it)
  and your spoiler text will be hidden until the reader highlights it. Here's an example (and it's not a real spoiler for those of you who don't like to be spoiled:
  
  Spoiler Alert: This week on B&B (click here and drag down to see the hidden spoiler)
  
  Brooke says something to someone.
  
  I think that's a cool trick that reinforces spoiler warnings.
  
  
• Emailing me: On this board, you don't have to leave the forum to go to your email program to contact me. Just click on the Contact link in the lower right hand corner and you will go to a form that will let you email me without leaving the forum.
  
  
• RSS RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. So if you are using an RSS reader to follow your favorite sites, you can use the two links at the lower right hand corner to subscribe to the feeds for either all posts or new threads.
  

OK. I think that's it for now. Let me know if you have any questions.