These things have probably been mentioned before elsewhere, but it looks like some are being forgotten about. This being the Newbies section I thought I'd mention them. The board is run under a piece of software called Scoop, which for the most part is very nice. But there are a few things to watch out for.
Numbers at the beginings of lines: I haven't seen this happen lately, but sometimes if you put a number at the beginning of a line, whether it's part of a measurement or whatever, Scoop will think it's part of a numbered list. It will put a period and a couple of extra spaces after it. So if you put 3.14159 at the beginning of a line you might end up with 3. 14159. I think I read somewhere that you can avoid this by putting at least one space before the number. Check your Preview before you click the Post button.
Images: Many grumbles here. First of all the board admins will kick out images over 150K, which is perfectly reasonable. What you should know about the handy button to insert images though is that Scoop will put HTML code around your image that limits it to 80% of the width of the table cell the message is in. This is particularly ugly if you've already taken time to make your image small, because then it stretches it to 80%. If the image is down around 200 pixels wide and it gets stretched, it looks really bad.
My favorite browser is Mozilla (the full version, not Firefox). In Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape, if you right-click on an image you'll see "View image" at the top of that menu. When you do that you'll see the image at it's true size, bypassing any HTML that's setting the size. If an image looks wrong in Scoop, I try that. Amazing what you see. I don't mean to mention names, but in the recent post of the Garbogens as an example, those images are up around 1152x864 pixels in reality. They're wonderful if you know how to see them full size. If you don't, you're downloading that full size anyway and the HTML is cramping it down pretty small. On dial-up that's not real fun.
I guess what I'm hoping is that people might be more responsible in posting images. Learn to resize them before you upload. For Windows users, IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) is a great little freeware viewer that can also resize and crop images. Cropping is a technique that can help to get more out of the pictures you upload. We don't need to see your whole desktop or garage, just what's relevant. In IrfanView it's as simple as drawing a box around part of your picture with the mouse and hitting Control-Y to crop. Crop it first, then resample what's left to about 600 pixels wide or so and save with a new name. If you're a *nix user (there probably aren't many of us), the Gimp is probably the most common program for doing this sort of thing. Please make sure what you upload is under 150K. If you've cropped and resized, this isn't usually a problem.
It's probably useful to learn a tiny bit of HTML as well, so you don't have to use the Image button. The Bare Bones Guide to HTML (http://werbach.com/barebones/barebones.html) is a very concise introduction, but there's a lot of other stuff on the web as well. Jump right to the Graphics section in Bare Bones and look at how to specify the image URL. I upload to my images area and keep that in one browser tab, then compose the post in another tab. When I want the URL of an image, I flip to that tab, right-click and copy the image location, then flip back to my post and paste. Then I Preview to check.
What people are doing is working. It just bugs me to see people uploading big images and having them resized in the browser to small sizes. Both for space and speed reasons, and because there are probably plenty of people who don't know how to see them in their full glory. I put on my glasses for a closer look, then I think twice and right-click.
I'm off my soapbox and going home for the weekend. 2 days of dialup, when I can tie up the phone line.
Alan
