Forum Introductory Tour

[Administrator]

Hello and Welcome,
This forum should serve as a robust home base for Foreskin Restorers and Intactivists (men, women, and children) for years to come.

By way of definition, this User Group is divided into forums, containing topics (which it calls threads) and messages (which it calls posts). If you make a posting, you have the option to get replies e-mailed to you. This is called subscribing to a thread. You can also subscribe to threads in which you haven't posted.

When someone creates a new thread, they are called the Original Poster (OP), and our culture gives some special privileges to OPs. They can set ground rules for what is discussed in "their" thread and we should respect those. A thread should have a detailed title which is not deliberately vague or leading. This helps the forum search function work better, helps our users make better choices about which links to click, and helps Google do a good job promoting our activity. We appreciate carefully typed, properly capitalized content, avoiding keyboard shortcuts as are common in text messaging. Please break long entries into paragraphs. White space makes ideas easier to follow.

Note the textual navigation tree at the top of the screen. It shows which thread you're currently viewing and gives you clickable links to the forums and sub-forums you followed to get to the current location. If you find a forum with a topic that interests you - say they Chinese section under Global Outreach - you can navigate to that section and then use the Forum Tools menu to subscribe to that forum. Then if anyone ever posts in Chinese, you'll get an e-mail.

At the start of every thread is the Thread Tools menu. This gives you a way to subscribe to a thread even if you haven't posted in it. You can set your account's default mode of subscribing to the threads within which you post by using the USER CP menu option at the upper left and choosing Options. Then scan those options for Default Thread Subscription Mode.

Also on that Thread Tools menu is a way to e-mail someone a link to the thread. If you want to send someone (or yourself) a link to a specific posting within the thread, click the post number at the upper right of the posting. This will open a new browser with just that single post displayed. You can copy the URL from the browser's address bar and paste that into an e-mail or posting.

Some of our forum sections are moderated, like Links, since they are basically reference lists we will want to keep orderly. Please do post and don't be offended when I re-format things.

Foreskin Restorers should post some photos in the Progress Galleries forum. In that section, only the person who started the thread will be able to add posts with new photos so it's really YOUR personal progress diary. (This format will be easier to browse than just putting photos on your user profile page, but feel free to put them there, too.) Title your gallery thread with your User Name and viewers will be able to use the "sort by thread title" feature (at the bottom of every forum page) to quickly find you. The first Gallery post is held for moderation (perhaps a day or less) so we don't get redundancies or misleading names.

Under Intactivism we have a Press Room forum which is a comprehensive archive of searchable press clippings. I'll moderate that after-the-fact to see that things are in a consistent useful format.

I'd really like to see people make use of the Calendar feature to keep abreast of things like upcoming NORM meetings or Intactivist marches. There are TWO calendars; "Restoration" and "Intactivism." Any upcoming events on the Calendars show up on the bottom of the main screen when you log in.

This system has Private Messaging so you can contact people without giving out your e-mail address. It should also help keep any flame wars behind closed doors. One way to send a user a message is to click on their name while reading one of their postings. If you don't intend to check your Private mailbox, you can disable message receipt so people won't send things and then think you're ignoring them.

I'm not an expert on this vBulletin forum system yet, but I have added a "Find My Posts" feature to the main menu so you can easily track discussions you're involved in (some people report that they get logged out after they use Find My Posts. I'm working on fixing it). You'll also see "New Posts" to quickly scan everything that was added since your last visit. Look around the page and notice that some of the distracting features (for example the box in the lower left called Posting Rules) can be collapsed, and the system will remember your settings for how you viewed things.

I'd like to put a FAQ sticky thread in each section. If you want to contribute something to that end it would be much appreciated.

FYI, your username may not contain the following character strings: casino, cheap, cialis, clit, cock, cum, cunt, doctor, drugs, fuck, porn, pussy, shit, or viagra. This helps keep some spam robots from signing up. If your desired name includes one of those, contact me for help over-riding the rule (or for a stern lecture on manners).

PLEASE offer suggestions, especially if you have some experience working these bulletin board systems.

Cheers,
-Ron Low

[admin]

We have 4 custom codes that can be used in messages here at our forum. These are called BBCodes. They let you incorporate web features that are otherwise unavailable within the body of a text message.

BBCodes consist of an opening tag, one or more parameters, and a closing tag.

For example if there was a BBCode to put your FaceBook avatar into a message, it might look like this:
[FaceBook]yourFBid[/FaceBook] (where yourFBid is your FaceBook e-mail address. Alas, that code is fictitious).

Our actual BBCodes are:

YouTube: if you know the code for your video, enclose that code within YouTube tags to create an embedded video that others can see in your forum posting. For example:


This is generated by finding a video at YouTube.com and noting its address, in this case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU5aXfJLBb4. See the part I've bolded after the "=" sign? That's the YouTube ID of this specific video, and that's what goes between the tags. So it would look like this:

{YouTube}hU5aXfJLBb4{/Youtube}

except that square brackets [ would be used instead of curly braces {.

Our other BBCodes that work similarly are:
Vimeo: To display a Vimeo.com video in the body of a posting.

Zazzle: To display a video panel that scrolls the items from your Zazzle.com gallery.

LubeYourTube: To display a playable video from LubeYourTube.com (in the Dark Side section of our forum only, please).

GoogleVideo: Like the YouTube tag, displays a video hosted at Video.Google.com

The easy way to use a BBCode is to type the parameter, highlight it, then click the little icon for the BBCode you want to use. This will enclose that parameter in the tags so you don't have to type the tags. For example, I assigned the BBCode for YouTube a little picture shaped like a TV set with the letters YT on the screen. These BBCode icons are visible just above the text editing window while you're creating a message. Hover over them to see their descriptions.

Feel free to contact me for help using these, or to suggest BBCodes for other web features.

Cheers,
-Ron