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Tricks

Inserting Special Characters

The forum server will display some -- but by no means all -- of the special font characters that can be found on the net.  Most often seen in the Basin forums are the characters for:

• The registered mark:  ®
• The trademark:  ™
• The copyright mark:  ©

One way to insert them into a post of your own is to find them in another post (or elsewhere on the internet), highlight them with your cursor, copy them (Ctrl-C), and paste them (Ctrl-V) into your post.  An easier way is to instead type into your posts the following, for whichever character you want:

(r)
(tm)
(c)

The Basin server will automatically convert your character string into the corresponding special character.  For other special characters you will need to copy/paste them from another location where they already appear.  Be sure to test them in the Preview Post window, to see if they display.  And remember that special characters may display in your version of your browser, but not on the browsers of everyone else.

Linking to a Specific Post

When you create a URL link to a thread (or to a given page in a multi-page thread), anyone activating the link will be taken to the post at the top of the page.  With the latest release of the forum software it is now easy to link directly to a specific post anywhere within a thread.  Find the post you want to link to and click the "Posted:" link in the top bar of the post, just left of the date/time for the post. A pop-up window displays the address for that particular post. Copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C on Windows). Then in the edit window for the post you are drafting click the "http://" button and paste in the address for your target post. Hit Enter, then enter the text to display for the link you're creating. That's it!

The old method of linking to a specific post required manual insertion of the url for a post, and still works for those who are gluttons for hard work. It involves some fancy code work, and you're inclined to try it be sure you know how the Basin's forum URLs are structured.  You will find that information here:

How Forum URLs Work

The first step is to create a standard URL link to the destination page.  If you don't already know how to do that, you'll find out here.  Make certain that your session id number doesn't appear in that URL.  Look for the session variable ("s") followed by the "=" symbol.  If the "s=" symbols come at the very end of the URL and have no characters to their right, then the session id has already been properly suppressed.  If the "s=" symbols appears anywhere else in the URL, then either the character immediately after the "=" symbol is the "&" symbol (in which case the URL is ready to use), or else there is a long string of numbers and letters there that represents the session id.  That entire string of characters between the "s=" symbols and the first "&" symbol to the right of them must be deleted before you can use the URL as a link.

Once you have made sure that the session id doesn't appear in the URL, paste the address into the opening URL tag in your post.  Now you are ready to make the final adjustments to the tag.

The secret behind your ability to link to a specific post lies in the fact that the forum software creates a unique bookmark for every post.  What you are going to do is add a reference at the end of the target page's URL address to focus on a specific post's bookmark.

First, you need to find out the unique bookmark number for the post you want to target.  Go to that post (you may want to do that in a separate browser window) and hover your cursor over the button in the upper right of the post.  At the bottom of your browser window you will see a URL address with a multi-digit number.  It is the number in the url tied to the variable 'p', and you will find it by looking for the syntax, "&p=#####", where the cross-hatch characters represent the bookmark number that you want.  Write it down.

Then go back to your post window.  At the end of the URL address in the URL opening tag for your link, add the following characters:

where the value is the multi-digit bookmark number.  That's all there is to it.  Click "Preview Post" and test the link as it appears in the preview window.

Inserting Quotes with Source Info

As we saw in the section on the standard QUOTE code, you can generate a quotation box in your message by inserting QUOTE tags in your Post Window, or you can have the server generate a quotation box with text from an earlier post by clicking the button in that post's window.  If you use the second technique the server generates a source message on top of the quote box, displaying author and date/time information about the earlier post.  You cannot edit that source message.

To create a quotation box with a source message that you can edit, create the quotation box from inside your Post Window and add a value to the opening QUOTE tag.  Using this method you could type a post like this:

That post would display like this:

Technically, the syntax for adding values to the QUOTE command is:

When you click the button to add a post to a thread, the server automatically inserts as the first value the name of the author of the post you are quoting, and for the second value inserts the date/time of that post, displaying both values with a '@' symbol between them.  You can overwrite the automatic values for a quote by inserting values of your own, using a comma to separate the two allowed values is you want both values to display.  Leave the comma out if you want just one value (such as a simple phrase) to display.

Tab Indents

Newspapers, books and magazines all begin their paragraphs with a tab indent.  Not so with Basin posts: The first word of each paragraph begins smack up against the left margin of the page.  Keying the space bar at the start of a post paragraph indents your text in the editing window but not in the final display of your post.  The same is true of the tab key: For display, the server ignores it.  No matter how badly you want your posts to appear with the first line indented, you are out of luck.  Unless, of course, you know this little trick.

Instead of trying to fill the indented part of the first line with empty space, fill it with actual characters but make those characters invisible.  To do that you simply set the color of the characters' font to the same color as the display background.

In the default D2 forum skin the background to the post window is black.  So if you want a paragraph in a post to look like this:

then you should type your post like this:

Be aware, though, of one drawback to this technique.  While it renders your black characters entirely invisible to viewers using the normal D2 forum skin, forum users can (and some do) set their controls to the ib skin, which has a very light gray background.  For those viewers, the "black" characters will in fact display as black, and therefore be quite visible.  In order for your indents to display even in the ib skin as a somewhat orderly post, you might want to use underline or period characters for all "invisible" characters.

Margin Indenting

As hard as it is to get the server to indent just one line, you would think even Hercules would struggle getting the entire left margin to indent.  He would, but only because he was a bit dim about computers.  You have no such weakness.

Although none of the ib codes suggests how to move the left margin, you can do it by manipulating the LIST code.  The long way of doing it is to click the LIST button above the Post Window, type out as a separate bullet item each paragraph of text that you want inset, end the LIST code (by hitting ENTER twice or cancelling the LIST window), and then go back and delete all of the characters for the bullets themselves.  An even quicker method is to type out all your text directly in the Post Window, manually type in the opening LIST tag where you want indented margins to begin, and manually type in the closing LIST tag where you want the indented margins to end.

The 'Code' code

The time may come when you want to make a post that displays ib codes instead of executing them.  You might, for example, spot someone in the Testing Grounds having trouble making font sizes change properly and decide to append a post about the correct way to do it.  The problem, of course, is that if you type the correct command in your post the server will interpret and apply it, rather than displaying the code characters.  To fool the server you could insert extra characters in the ib command (for example, putting a space inside each opening bracket), and then explain in your post how to retype the code characters to make the command actually work.

But there is a better way: The CODE code.  Its syntax is identical to the QUOTE command, and the text bracketed by the opening and closing CODE tags is displayed in a separate window (again, like the QUOTE command), but everything within the CODE tags is displayed as-is, ib codes included! So if you type your post this way:

Your post will display like this: