Forum Help Thread: Tips and Tricks

Morgan Biscup

This forum is built on Flarum, selected because of its fun mix of old-style forum feel with newer layouts and features more reminiscent of other social chat options like Discord. I've installed an assortment of extensions created and maintained by the Flarum community to help personalize our space, including one that pushes updates for a more realtime conversation feel, but this is still a forum.

This thread is meant as a compilation of information on forum features. Feel free to ask questions in this thread if something isn't clear or you're at a loss on how to perform an action.

To scroll quickly through a large thread, use the scrollbar to the bottom of the right sidebar on computer, or the very top of the page on mobile. Click the spoilers below for images:

Scroll Posts on PC

Scroll Posts on Mobile

Morgan Biscup

Profile and Account Settings

To edit your settings, scroll all the way to the right of the header bar on PC, or select it from the top drop down on mobile:

View on PC

View on Mobile

From there you'll gain access to all sorts of permissions, including changing your nickname, and a large list of notification options.

Morgan Biscup

Light and Dark Mode

Under settings, beneath all the notification options, you can find the option to update your default forum settings to light mode, dark mode, or to key off your device settings:

This is also where you can update your post autosave settings or disable them entirely. (Autosave will save your posts as drafts while you write, and you can set the interval. This way if you never lose what you're typing, and can even save drafts of new threads for later.)

You can also find the option to switch between light and dark mode under the profile menu when clicking on your name and picture.

A. Dani

Some bbcode snippets for your posts:

Accordion Spoilers

Use one of the following:

[details]Text Here[/details]

[details title="Text Here!"]Text here[/details]

to respectively get:

Text Here

and

Text Here!

Text here

that folks can click on to expand more content.

Bbcode for Images

You can control size, alt text, hover-over text, and set a link to open when clicking on images, all through bbcode!

All the available params are here:

[url=https://www.queerbooks.space][img width="100" height="50" alt="QueerBooks logo" title="This is the queer books logo, smooshed"]https://www.queerbooks.space/assets/logo-lti4glbr.png[/img][/url]

if you want an image without an outgoing link:

[img width="100" height="50" alt="QueerBooks logo" title="This is the queer books logo, smooshed"]https://www.queerbooks.space/assets/logo-lti4glbr.png[/img]

if you want an image with default size parameters:

[img alt="QueerBooks logo" title="This is the queer books logo, smooshed"]https://www.queerbooks.space/assets/logo-lti4glbr.png[/img]

Morgan Biscup

Forum Search

Our forum has a robust search function that can check for more than just words. For example, adding is:sticky will limit your search to threads that have been stickied.

There is a full list of options under the search feature. The options at the time of this post include:

search options

is:
hidden, unread, following, ignoring, solved, private, frontpage, sticky, locked

author:
username or comma-separated list of usernames

created:
2020-12-31 or 2020-12-31..2021-09-30

tag:
name of a tag, or comma-separated list of tag names, or "untagged"

byobu:
username or display name of a recipient

Among others!

Search will only return results which fulfill all listed criteria. For example, if you wanted to search for all stickied announcements, you'd type is:sticky tag:announcements, whereas if you wanted all threads tagged romance without the MF tag, you'd use tag:genre-romance -tag:pairing-mf. Note the dashes instead of spaces for multi-word tags.

There is no way at present to include an OR search, so if you wanted to find all threads tagged romance excluding any MF pairings not also tagged queer, you'd need two searches, the one above plus an additional tag:genre-romance tag:genre-queer tag:pairing-mf.

The search also does not accept wildcards or partial input when searching. A search for tag:join or tag:join* will return zero results, rather than a list of all the join threads. Likewise, searching thread titles or post content requires typing the entire word, partial words and wildcards do not work.