Advanced Features

So, you're now ok with navigating and simple posting. Good going trooper!

This post will help you with some more of our advanced features to further enhance your experience and knowledge with our community. So take a glance through and see what else you can learn!

We'll jump right to it this time. If you have got this far then you should have a lot of the basics covered, and should have already got yourself a few posts under your belt.

Quoting

Quoting is a feature used quite widely on many forums as a way to "nest" someone else's post into a reply. It helps for people to understand which parts of a person's post you might be replying to in particular, as you can remove un-needed parts, or just leave the whole post as it was originally (not recommended for large posts - condensed versions always preferred).

It's a pretty simple process, very similar to that you would use when creating your own reply to somebody's topic.

To use it, there are a few different methods.

While viewing somebody's post, you will notice a small "quote" button - on the top right hand corner of each post in a thread. By clicking this, you will be taken to the "reply" screen, and you will notice that the text of the post you just clicked will be inside your content box. This is where you can edit the quoted text, then add your own in response.

Ideally, you should put your response below all the quote code. General forum use around the web has dictated that it's the normality for a few years now.

In addition to this, when you look at the nested code for the quoted post, you will see that the forum automatically adds two small tags:

[quote] and [/quote]
Basically, any text that appears inside two of those tags will be formatted in a quote style. For Example:

[quote]This is the quoted text[/quote]
will look like:

This is the quoted text

You can also add the author like this:

[quote author=CookieMcCrumble]This is the quoted text[/quote]

This is the quoted text

Another way to add quotes is by looking in the "Topic Summary" area below your post box. You'll see all recently posted replies, and on the right you'll see an "insert quote" button. If you click that, it will add that particular post, in nested format, into your reply, ready for edit and/or reply.

So, quite a deep method, but all leading to similar results. Quoting is a great way of continuing the flow of topics and singling out parts of messages in order to reply specifically. Bear in mind also that any text can be quoted - so if you take some text from another site you can put it in some quote tags, add the author, and it will be labelled up correctly.

It might take some practice, but it's well worth learning how to quote.


Calendar

Have you noticed the calendar on the top-left of the page? We don't just use that for working out what day it is, oh no. We also use if for listing birthdays and events. And it is such an easy process, too. We recently made this feature available to all members - so now there really is *no* excuse for not getting your events posted and linked for all to see!!

The best way to create an event for the calendar starts with you creating your post. You will need to create your game event in the "Meet-Up Madness" forum as usual. Include all the usual details - Game name, platform, date, time, and what you plan to be doing. Include as much information as you can to gather as much interest as possible.

Once your post has been created, you'll want to link it. Simply go back to view your post, and just underneath it you will see a button labelled "Link To Calendar". Click this button.

You will then be taken to a new page with a few new fields. Some should be filled in already, making your job that little bit easier.

The only ones you should need to fill in here, are the "Event Title", "Number Of Days", and the "Date". Make your event title something short and informative. For example "Modern Warfare 2 PS3 - 8pm". Make sure the "Number Of Days" is set to "1" and most importantly make sure that you put the correct date in the corresponding boxes.

Once you have completed those boxes, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click "Save" If your event is approaching soon, it may have already been added to the calendar list and you will be able to see it on the top left. If not, it may be more days away than the limit - don't worry, it will appear as the date approaches. Also, by clicking the event title in the calendar box once it's on there, and members will be taken directly to your event post, meaning they can reply directly.

Great feature, huh!

We encourage all members to use this, as it could attract more players to your events.


Image Gallery

At TGR, we try and offer you as many useful services as we can. That's why another of our fantastic features is that we have an image gallery usable by all members, in which they can upload any pictures to be hosted from here.

It's a little more simple than your other gallery affair (like Photobucket, Flickr) but it offers you all the basics you need to host your images for use on, or off site.

To access the gallery, click one of the gallery links towards the top of the page. The first page you will see is a list of all the galleries we have available.

Feel free to click on some, and have a look at some of the images already uploaded. You may view particular images and comment on them too. Awesome!

If you would like to add your own images to the gallery, then follow these instructions.

The first step you need to take, is heading into the correct gallery. So, for example, if you have some Gran Turismo 5 screenshots you would like to upload, click the "Gran Turismo 5 Screenshots" album. Then, click "Add A Picture".

On this screen, enter a picture title such as "Gran Turismo 5 - Mad Air!", and also a description if you wish. One thing to check each time is that the Category is correct - just make sure this still matches the album you wish to upload to. Finally, head to the bottom, and click "Choose File". You will then be able to navigate to your picture file (or even simpler, drag it from an explorer window into the "Choose File" box and then click "Add Picture".

You will then be taken to an image index of all your own images posted. You may click "Add a Picture" on this page to upload more images - but very importantly you must make sure you change the "Category" field to match the album you want to upload to, or it will upload to the default album. Or, click "Return To Gallery" and start from the start again.

To link your picture elsewhere, there's another really simple process. Go into the gallery, and click to view your chosen image. Lower down, below the picture on the view screen, you will see a few boxes titled "Image Linking Codes". These are the codes you need to link the images on to posts on our site, or elsewhere on the web.

To insert a post into a thread on Total Games Realm, simply copy the whole text inside the "BB Code" box, and paste it directly into any post on our site just as it is. On posting your message, the picture will be included in the content.

This can sometimes lead to size issues, however. If you have uploaded a picture that's a little too big to fit in a post, but it looks ok in the gallery, then there's a simple way to fix that.

If you look at the BBCode used to link the image, it will look something like this:

[img]http://www.tgrealm.com/gallery/1_05_01_11_1_43_28.jpeg[/img]
It is very easy to resize an image by adding a small bit of text to the image tag. You will need to add a width setting, which can be done like so:

[img width=200]http://www.tgrealm.com/gallery/1_05_01_11_1_43_28.jpeg[/img]
You'll see that the added code is "width=200" in the first part of the tag. The number can be changed to reflect a reasonable appearance in your post. Please bear this in mind and use it if you need to to make sure the forum retains size proportions reasonably.

Lastly, before you upload a picture, take a look at the original image. Is it absolutely massive? Is it bigger than 600px wide? If it is, it might look absolutely awful and gigantic when it's uploaded.

Instead of uploading it in it's current state, you may feel free to use our on-site image resizer. Please consider this as upload large picture can lead to a few issues, including our web server folder size reaching maximum, and also would massively distort the appearance of the forum.

To use the resize tool, head into the gallery as before, and get as far as the "Add A Picture" screen. Above the Title and Category fields, you'll see a link that leads you to the "Resize Image Application", click it.

**Please make sure you back up your original image before doing this, as it will overwrite your selected image with the new size with no way to undo it!**

Simply select your image by going to "Choose File" and select the width you require. Our Maximum is 600px, so please try to keep it below that, lower if possible. Once you are happy with the selection, click "Submit". Check your picture, upload it, and there you go, your newly resized image fits perfectly.

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So there we go, another post with some tips for you to get more out of the website.

We hope you find it useful, and keep an eye open for more tips soon.

**Space Reserved**