Forum use: bb tutorial and picture hosting

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Here are some helpful tips on the use of forums for the purpose of not only adding to the research forums, but to find your way around the other discussion areas.

bbCodes

These are the simple HTMLish codes for altering the appearance of your text, quoting other individuals for ease in replying, displaying links to other webpages, and displaying images.

All of your easy tools are accessible at the top of your reply area. You can click the tool you wish to apply to a highlighted text or url. Or you can hand type the codes into the text box as you go along. Additionally, you can do some additional things to enhance your forum experience by altering a bit of the bbcodes. For example, you can change the quote text, change a URL to a titled link, make images hyperlinks themselves, etc. To discover the use of all this stuff simply go to the tutorial page this forum offers for a more detailed description.....

Fully detailed bbCodes forum tutorial

Hosting and Posting images

This can be intimidating to the most seasoned websurfer. It doesn't need to be. Once you take a look at the function of the bbcodes you only have to go looking for images to display in your posts. The first important thing you need to understand is you cannot just upload pictures from your desktop or camera to the forums. They have to be available somewhere online at another site specializing in hosting. It could be a homepage that your internet service provider offers or another online service that specializes in personal use picture hosting like Photobucket. I personally have always used Photobucket and have never found a need to try out other services. It has always been free for me and has never given me any hassle. So for the purpose of this tutorial I shall walk you through the Photobucket system. The only thing that I urge you to keep in mind is photobucket does occasionally purge inactive accounts. So use it or lose it. Once you start hosting pictures and they get occasional hits or page views on a forum, your account will remain active even if you don't log into it or upload pictures. Avatar hosting is a great way to keep it going if you don't happen to host and post your images frequently. I have kept an account active for 5 years now mostly by posting to forums occasionally with my avatar.

http://photobucket.com/

Simply go to the photobucket site and set up your account. Once you confirm the account with your email, you are ready to begin uploading images. It couldn't be easier.....

-->Scan your item or take a picture with a digital camera and store this in a file on your computer.

-->Open your photobucket account page and go to "My Album".

-->Go to the large upload area and select one of the "browse" buttons. This allows you to look through your computer files to select the image you wish to host.

-->Once you select the image hit the "Upload" button and photobucket has captured that image and added it to your account.

-->What is also great about photobucket is they will automatically resize your larger images to a more comfortable size that will fit within the monitors of most computers. The limit to photobucket is 800 px in any direction. Any larger pixel range than that and everyone on the forum will have to use the scroll buttons on their computers to see disappearing text from left to right because your image forcing the entire forum page to a much wider margin. Lets say you post the image and you are unsatisfied still with the size. Photobucket has tools that will automatically resize the image to your liking without affecting or breaking the url you have already posted to your forum post. Hint: As a rule of thumb...Always work from large to small when editing the sizes of your images. Images always shrink nicely and retain their original quality. Images don't like to have the size increase as the detail will always drop off.

-->Now that the image is officially hosted on the web it is time to take the URL or the address of the image. Photobucket has made clicking and pasting easy by just clicking on the "url link" button directly below the image and this will automatically cut the link to your clipboard or what used to require Ctrl C on your keyboard. Now you can paste this via Ctrl V on your keyboard to the reply area on this forum and apply bbCodes.

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If you have any questions please feel free to ask one of the tome crew. But I personally prefer if you just fire up a question thread in the general forum. The more people are thinking through how to use this stuff the better it is for the research forum and collectible community as a whole.
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