USING THE NEW FORUMS

The operation of the Forums is pretty much as you've all been used to, and we've tried to keep the look and feel as close to the old one as possible.

If you haven’t yet logged in, you’ll find you need to do so with your USERNAME and password, not your email address as previously.

But there are a few new things to learn:

1) Avatar uploads should now work for everyone!

- To upload your avatar, go to your 'My account' page, click 'Edit' and scroll down to the section labelled 'Picture'.

Here you can upload your picture – Maximum dimensions are 85x85 pixels and the maximum size is 30 kB – and, once you've confirmed your password, click 'save' to update your account details.

2) Picture uploads should work, too!

- To upload a picture, you'll first need to have it stored on a site such as Flickr or Picasa.

Copy the URL of the picture, then click the little 'tree' symbol on the menu bar of the Forum posting window, paste in the URL, and click the 'insert' button.

Pictures will, we're told, resize automatically.

3) Links, when typed into a Forum post, will automatically become clickable. No need to do all that HTML stuff: just type a web address, and it becomes a link.

4) To reply to a post, click the 'reply' button below the post in question. To quote the post in your answer, click 'quote' instead of reply, go to the end of the text, and after the end quote tag, which is [ /quote] start typing your reply.

Please note you can edit down the quoted text to just quote the bit you want – no point in quoting a whole post and its picture when you're only responding to one point in the post. Just ensure the bit of text has the [ quote=username ] tag in front of it, and the [ /quote ] after it.

5) To post your thoughts, click 'save' or, if you want to see how things will look before posting, click 'preview' first.

6) The 'Flag as offensive' button now works: anything you think the moderators should have a look at, click this button, fill out the short form it brings up, and click 'send'.

One more thing – you'll no longer be able to edit your comment once it's been replied to. Just saves arguments about who actually said what...