How to Use The Forum

[Maypews]

The Basics
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This is just a little section dedicated to explaining some functions that may not be immediately obvious if you haven't used a phpBB forum in a good while. First, you can click the red sheet icon beside threads to go to the latest unread post. Second, I'd recommend giving your user control panel a good look once you sign up. From here you can set up many of the functions I'm about to talk about below, as well as customise your profile in other less obvious ways such as adjusting your username colour or selecting a banner for your profile page.

Setting an Avatar
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To quickly and easily set an avatar, find the image that you'd like to use. Then head over to ezgif.com. First, ensure that the image is in a 1:1 aspect ratio. If it's not, go to the crop section, upload your image, select the 1:1 option in the "Lock ratio" tab, and crop it to your fancy. Then head back to your user control panel and set it as your avatar.

Forum Signature
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A forum signature is a collection of text or images that will appear under all of your posts. There is a 10 image limit mainly to accomodate the use of userbars without going overboard, but try to avoid making spammy signatures that take up half the page. The best place that I'm aware of to find signatures currently is over at the Deviantart Signature-Lab group. Once you have selected the signature that you want, you can then upload it at a temporary filehosting service like catbox.moe and insert it into your signature. Signatures can be further customized with the use of BBCode, which will be explained below.

Reactions
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Reactions are a way of expressing your opinions or thoughts on a post without going through the trouble of replying. They're especially useful if someone says how you were feeling on the matter adequately; in such a situation, a user will instead issue a reaction to this post instead of making their own post basically repeating what has already been said.

To react to a post, just click the smiley icon in the bottom right corner. If you aren't sure what a reaction is meant to convey, try hovering your cursor over it and waiting for the text to appear. The title of the reaction will usually give some insight into this.

Upas & Waifus
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Upas are our site currency. You earn 10 Upas for every post, and you can then reinvest these Upas into Waifus. We also have a lottery system which draws once per month, and you can transfer upas to other users if you wish. Waifus are characters that appear both on your profile page and in your mini-profile next to your posts. You can buy waifus in the shop, either with straight up cash or rolling them via lootboxes. There will also be limited time/stock waifus, so make sure to have some Upas ready on hand!

Profile Customisation
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We also have an old YouTube-style profile customiser! Using this, you can change the colours, background image, font and mouse cursor of your profile. To access it, go to User Control Panel > Manage Profile Theming.


Webring
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There is a tab on the top bar for our site's webring, the idea behind it being for it to contain the personal websites or other internet projects of forum members. The process of joining is fully automated, and the only requirement is that you link back to us on your website somewhere and identify your Lab Member number in the description. Said link back does not have to be on your index page. Simply enter the URL to where you have it linked in the field where it asks for the link back and link back to your index/landing page for the site's listed URL.

Profile Flairs
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Profile flairs are little 88x31 buttons that appear under your username and info when you post and also on your profile page itself. I may make some of these correspond to forum milestones in the future, but for now all are unlocked by default. To set one, click on your username on the top navigation bar -> User Control Panel -> Profile -> Manager Profile Flair and select the ones you'd like to display.

Flairs are automatically sorted by the order I add them in and as far as I'm aware there's no way of changing this. With that said if you want some flairs higher than the others you can click the star icon and it will "favourite" them, putting them at the top of your list.

BBCode
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BBcode is a series of simple codeblocks that allows you to achieve special effects on your post. It is very simple to use, all you need to do is put a start tag where you want the code to begin and an end tag where you want it to end. Here is an example of how it works.

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[b] = This tag allows you to bolden your text. 

Let's say that I want to bolden the "quick brown fox" portion of the sentence; "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". In order to do this, I would type the following.

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The [b]quick brown fox[/b] jumps over the lazy dog

Which comes out as;
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Above the posting field when making a post, there are several buttons which allow you to use BBcode without actually typing it out. All you have to do is highlight the portion of the text that you want to receive the effect with your mouse cursor and then click the corresponding button. If you leave your mouse over it, a tooltip will show up explaining how to use it.

Here is a list of BBCode that isn't present in this top bar.

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[left] = Allows you to align text or images to the left

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[right] = Allows you to align text or images to the right

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[center] = Allows you to align text or images to the centre

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[spoiler] = Adds a spoiler tag to your post.

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[mp4] = Allows you to embed attached videos.[/mp4]

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[strike]  = Adds a strikethrough to text

If you have further questions, please do shoot me a message! This thread will be a continual work in progress as I add new features and BBcode to the forum.