Admin Update: This was the winning entry that won the last Diablo 3 Betakey giveway on sc2sea.
Formatting your forum posts
Written and performed by System
So your wanting to post on this site, got a sick build / idea for your race and want to reap the rewards
of e-fame available to you through the reputation system on Sc2Sea?
Well now you can post absolutely a post full of shit, and still get Crazerk's +rep. 100% Guaranteed
You want to make a guide on the forums? Write up a tournament post or just about anything
on the site? To not get an angry Crazerk on your tail, you might want to format your post.
So, here is a guide on all the formatting options available to the website, in a single easy
convenient location.
Introduction to BBCodeTop BBCode or Bulletin Board Code is a lightweight markup language used to format posts in
many message boards. The available tags are usually indicated by square brackets ([ ])
surrounding a keyword, and they are parsed by the message board system before being
translated into a markup language that web browsers understand—usually HTML or XHTML.
Basic FormattingTop
The very basic type of formatting is the Bold, Itallic, and Underline.
Even if you stick to just using these 3 types of formatting for your posts, I guarantee Crazerk
will give you a reply that is nice. Might not give you the rep that your after, but with more
advanced formatting, your post will be looking spic and span.
We will also cover other ways to style your font and linking to images and YouTube videos in
this section!
Using BBCodeTop
Using BBCode is exactly like splitting your workers at the start of a game.
It might seem hard at first, but the more you do it, the more it becomes natural!
So how to use it, like we stated in the introduction you format your code using square brackets with the
keyword inside.
Make sure you close your brackets when your finished with your formatting on the specific text
or else the code will most likely not work and might stuff up other stuff you have.
Try to keep a mental note on what you have open and what you need to close
You: Alright System, thanks for that now I know how to bold headers and useful information
and format other information, but I have seen colourful headers like yours, how do I do those? System:
You can change the formatting of the text even more to be more specific in terms of size, colour and
even font type.
Font type is really depended on what is installed into the Forum and that is up to Nirvana, as it sits
right now, the font style is fine to read and the default size for normal text. But where you have
headers and other specific things you would want larger font.
Font colour is changed through the [color=x][/color] tags where x is equal to the colour you want your text to be.
Because Jesus invented the Internet and he is American make sure in your colour tag to spell it color.
Make sure you leave out the 'u' or else it won't work!
Also just recently Nirvana has added custom BBCode into the forums that allow us to have pre-formatted
text with lovely shades of various colours, like the headers I used above.
That is just one of the many different colours made available for use for the headers. You can try yourself what colours there are
or visit this link to find out more!
URL Linking is again just as easy as bolding a block of text, simply use the [url] tags and your good to go.
What you type:
[url]www.sc2sea.com[/url] or [url="www.sc2sea.com"]Link behind text[/url]
You can also embed a YouTube video into a forum post by using the [youtube] tags. Important note about using the YouTube tags is that you want to only put inside the tags the video
code for video you want, and not the entire link.
You get the video code by looking up at you address bar on your browser and copying the assorted letters and numbers after the v= part.
Example,
Sometimes, or more than often there will be more stuff in the address bar when your either watching
stuff from a playlist or have been linked to it from somewhere else. Thats no issue!
Remember to look for the ?v= in the link and copy the letters and numbers after that and up until the '&' symbol
What you type:
[youtube]jtMv6V7ZvmE[/youtube]
What you get:
System baby we love you!
Spoilers can be a big issue on major Starcraft websites when people come wanting to read stuff, and
not the actual results of the game, they can become upset and sad. So, this is where spoiler tags work wonders!
What you type:
[spoiler]HuK won MLG 2-0[/spoiler] or [spoiler=MLG Results]Huk won 2-0[/spoiler]
That is pretty much the basics, you are now no longer a forum posting noob and can start to make your posts look amazing and readable.
Don't forget that proper grammar and paragraphs also go a long way!
Stick around for Part 2 where we will cover the more advanced side to BBCode usage and formatting!
So now your all itchy and ready to tackle the big stuff? Good! All in all it is still quite easy to understand
and you will realize what I mean by that as we go through it all.
Font alignment is great and simple way to position text across the forum, it is a bit
messy by for simple and basic usage it does it's job well.
What you type:
[left]Left text[/left] or [center]Center text[/center] or [right]Right text[/right]
You can also postion things like images and YouTube videos by using the same tags.
Those aren't specifically used only for text, its to align anything withing the tags
Indenting certain lines of your text can also improve the visible quality of text.
Simply use the indent tags around the code you want indented and enjoy.
What you type:
Indenting is[indent]fun[/indent]isnt it?
What you get:
Indenting is
fun
isnt it?
So now all your text is colourful and aligned and sorted out properly, you may be thinking how do I organize some more formal
information, player names for the tournament. Prize pool tables etc. Well don't you fret we have all the tags you can dream of
and more!
Listing players name that are apart of a tournament you run can be done in two ways.
Through the use of Unordered lists and ordered lists.
Unordered lists are pretty much what you guess. Lists that are unordered. They will show up with the information you put
in it and stuff that into a Bullet point list.
What you type:
[list][*]System[*]Metsys[*]Some noob[/list]
What you get:
System
Metsys
Some noob
and Ordered lists are the same, but the points are either numbered or listed alphabetically depending on what value you put into the tag.
Using the value of 1 will give you a numbered list, and using the value of a will give you a alphabet list.
If you put another list tag inside an already existing list tag, you will get a second, slighty indented list. See the table of contents above for what I mean.
Tables can also be created through the use of BBCode but it is a little difficult
to do, and needs quite a lot of mental imagery to get the picture just right.
You could also just spam preview changes when your making the post as well if your a bit slow :P
What you type:
[table]1st Place | TBA | $10,000
2nd Place | TBA | $5,000
3rd Place | TBA | $2,500[/table]
There are other commands you can add to the table tag to change the style of the table.
For example the width.
This can be done by: [table="width=80%"]
Anchoring Links is a cool little way to add 'Anchors' to your posts so that you can link to different sections on the page.
A quick example would be the Table of contents I have here up the top, as well as
the Top links I have next to each header!
Creating the Anchor
It is just a simple tag that goes around the text you want to link to.
Smilies Smilies are small pictures of various images that have either been pre-loaded into the forums, or added by Nirvana.
The way that we write smilies here is by adding a lower case i before the word.
What you type:
iTroll
What you get:Using Maps
If you are writing up an Offline Tournament and need to have a map showing where it is located, simply use the GMAP tag shown below.
There is an entire list of every availble smilie to use on this forum over Here for your spamming plesure.
Things to noteTop
Try not to go overboard with formatting a post. While it is a good idea to spruce up a post, too much can make
it look over crowded and even more worse than it was before the formatting.
Think about what you want to do and don't over do it.
As you can see in the 2nd post here, there isn't all that much formatting. I can change all the headers to stand
out some more, but I feel that it would just over kill the post, instead of portraying the information.
As you can have also probably noticed, there are a lot of bolded words in the entire write up. These are mainly important terms that need to stand out to someone that is skim reading the post. Feel free to try this tactic
out on your posts as well. It really does work doesn't it!
Remember to use proper Grammar and spelling so that your paragraphs are placed out nicely, and you don't just have a wall of text.
Don't forget to Close off your tags as you are finished using them. Prevent yourself going bald over trying to
figure out whats wrong with your post.
The preview button is your best friend!
Be careful of using Case words. As some of the tags and values for the tags may be Case Sensitive.
The smilies work in the website chat!
Most of the formatting works in your Forum Signature. Go make it beautiful!
If you want to know how someone formatted something in their post, simply hit the Quote button
and it will show you exactly what they had written!
ConclusionTop
So hopefully now you have an understanding on how to properly use the forum's BBCode effectively, keep in mind
that every forum uses BBCode and you will find that most of the code shown here will work on any other website. So go
forth and create the most handsome text filled boxes of information you have ever dreamed of creating!
gg wp grats on tourney win? :P Awesome guide, and I agree that this should be stickied and added to the recommended to read thingy in the sign up(if sc2sea has one?)
This is a really good write up but is it not possible for this forum message system (e.g. when you press the "go advanced" button) to have options like you get in Microsoft Word where you can simply press buttons to get bold or different colours or whatever so that you don't need to know/ remember all these special things/ type in all the special words. What would also be great is if this message box could expand to the size of your whole screen so you can see all your writing easily and pick up spelling errors etc.
Wow, amazing post. It will really help future article writers. I won't have a good opportunity to use this though because I mainly respond rather than start posts. The effort required to format is sometimes very huge and to be honest I don't have the patience to do all that formating.
I know some forums that have buttons on the top that automatically put in the code either where your cursor is at the time, or around whatever text you have highlighted.
It is just an issue of implementing it, and something I am sure Nirvana will do eventually :P
I know some forums that have buttons on the top that automatically put in the code either where your cursor is at the time, or around whatever text you have highlighted.
There's that already (not everything like spoilers, etc., but the basic stuff). Go to Account -> Settings & Options -> Edit Options, scroll all the way to the bottom and change the Message Editor Interface to one of the more fancy ones.
Last edited by xpaperclip; Thu, 10th-Nov-2011 at 4:51 PM.
Reason: fix typo
There's that already (not everything like spoilers, etc., but the basic stuff). Go to Account -> Settings & Options -> Edit Options, scroll all the way to the bottom and change the Message Editor Interface to one of the more fancy ones.
Well there you go... exactly what I was hoping for!!
Thanks for posting this guide to help others that do not know how make fine edits to their forum posts to make them much more appealing to the eye and the code structure.
I am indeed quite confused. All of the above instructions are pretty much are under the advance post comment button all you have to do is select the text and edit the post that way. I'm not quite sure I understand the intent of using the code instead of just pressing a button for the simplicity of the users.
Otherwise great information!
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Starcraft Brood War Commentator; YouTube Team Night Clan Member
only play on
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