While composing your message, you may apply formatting to the text using the buttons in the post form. Simply select a segment of text and click on one of the buttons to apply formatting to it. You can also click on a formatting button to open a tag where the cursor is located, and then click on it again to close the tag after you've finished typing. Alternately, the "close tags" button will close all open tags.

To see an example of how the tags should be used, simply position the cursor over the button and consult the text in the help field below the buttons. There are also keyboard shortcuts, which can be used to quickly open and close tags. The formatting buttons in the post form are as follows: bold, italics, underline, colored text, quoted text, insert image, insert URL, and close all tags.

Users can also include an image that is hosted online somewhere by using the img tag. To use this tag, wrap the url of the image in [img] and [/img]. The message board will take care of the rest! The same formatting can be used to add a link to a post. For example, to link to www.dancarter.co.nz you could include either:

[url]http://www.dancarter.co.nz[/url]

or:

[url=http://www.dancarter.co.nz]The best website ever![/url]

The later format allows you to include a title for the link.

The quote tag is used to offset a section of text, and it gets automatically applied when you click on the quote button at the bottom of a post. To add an author to a quote tag, follow the same formatting that we saw with the URL tag:

[quote=author]quoted text here[/quote]

If you want to attach an image to your profile (that appears each time you post to the message board) you can click the 'profile' link at the top of the message board. (you must be logged on to do this). There you will find details for uploading your image.

When you create a link in a message board post there is no option to open the link in a new window.If you want to open a link in a new window (this depends on how your browser is set up, assuming here that it is set up to open links in the existing page) you will have to right click the link and select 'Open link in new window' or 'Open link in new tab' (firefox or IE7 only).