Forum Usage Manual

To sign in, type your user name and password at the very top right of the page and click log in. The log out button will be there too when you are signed in.

Now, the first thing you will notice is the bar at the top with four tabs, one saying "Home", another saying "Forum", and another saying "What's New?", and then "Chat".
"Home" brings you to the DV Homepage, and "Chat" opens a window for DV chat.
Now, we will look at the "Forum" tab and the "What's new" tab.

Forum:

When this tab is selected, there will be 6 little tabs under it. And the Main forum index will be shown.
NOTE: The "Forum Threads" and "New Forum Posts" boxes at the right can be brought out of sight by pressing the little arrow to the left of the box.


From the forum index, you can see all the forums and subforums. On each forum, you will notice two little buttons, one is an orange "RSS" button, and the other is a green tick.
The RSS button allows you to view the RSS feed of the forum you selected it by.
The green tick subscribes you to that forum. You can view these subscriptions by clicking "Control Panel", the page that appears shows the forum subscriptions.
(Note, this does not subscribe you to the threads inside the forum, only to the forum itself)


What's New?
This tab brings up 4 little tabs. And the "New Posts" option is the page that is already opened.


Settings (Control Panel):
We have already looked at some of the features of the control panel, which is the Private Messaging, Subscriptions, Friends and Contacts, and a little bit of the profile and account settings.
As for the rest of it, a lot of it is fairly self-explanatory and easy to use. Standard profile picture, and avatar, signature editing. Then there is Profile Privacy. This allows you to set who will see what from your profile.
And down at "attachments", you can view all pictures you have in the past uploaded as attachments.






Profile:
You can view your own profile by pressing the button at the top which says your username, or the "My Profile" button, two buttons to the right.
The first thing you may notice is, it is not your avatar that shows as the main picture, it is your "profile picture" instead. (Your avatar shows below, though)


A very interesting new feature is "Visitor Messages". Members can post on your profile, and you can post on it too.
And you can select the "About Me" tab to see your information, and also the "Friends" tab to see a list of your friends (Not contacts)
Note: In the list of users online, there will be a "+" sign next to their name if they are on your contact list.
And friend requests will appear in "notifications" at the top.


Searching for Posts/Threads
On any page of the forum, there is a search bar to the top right. Type in keywords there to bring up searches for posts and visitor messages.
Or you can use "Advanced Search" button, right under the search bar. Most options are pretty self-explanatory. Although you may be wondering what it means by "Search Multiple Content Types". Well, that basically means you can search for 1, 2 or 3 different types of messages in the one search. And of course, "Search Single Content Type" means you only search one type. The three different content types are Forums, Posts and Visitor Messages. Searching a "Forum" will give results for full forums and sub-forums. Not the threads or posts inside them.


Posting in Threads:


Any reply button you hit will take you to Quick Reply. But if you press a "reply" or "reply with quote" button twice, it will bring you to advanced reply. Or you can just press the "go advanced" button underneath the quick reply box.

Making the post is fairly normal. But you can embed Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Google and facebook videos by pressing the little video tape button, and entering the URL. (Tags are [ video]video url[/video])