I hope Richard doesn't mind me pitching in as it is his forum- I'll happily remove this if he wants.
If you've managed to post a new 'topic' on here, then it looks like you already have the hang of it! There really isn't much else to it.
Basically, like any forum, LNER.info uses a hierarchical structure- i.e there is the forum as a whole, which on here is called the '
board index', within which there are various sub-fora. When you want to make a new topic for discussion you simply go to the relevant sub forum and click '
new topic' to start a discussion 'thread'
The layout of the forum is thus:
-
BOARD INDEX
----LNER Discussion
-----------LNER News
-----------General LNER Discussion
-----------LNER Locomotives and Rolling Stock
-----------LNER People
-----------LNER Photographs
-----------Model Railways
-----------Classifieds
----Non-LNER Chat
-----------Railway Chat
-----------General Chat
----Official
-----------Official Announcements
-----------Suggestion Box
_______________________________
Once you have navigated to the sub forum in which you wish to post a new discussion, you simply click '
new topic' and fill in all the relevant boxes. There are various buttons along the top where you can add emphasis by adding italics or bold. These are again simple one-click functions where it should be clear what to do. The smiley faces on the left hand side should in fact be illegal in this country, so please don't use them....
When you are finished, click '
submit' and bobs your uncle! If you click '
preview' you can see what your post will look like when it is up on the website. This is primarily of use if you are inserting images or doing somehting odd with the formatting which makes you think you might have cocked something up. If you are simply typing plain-text, there is no benefit in previewing your post.
Reading topics can be a time-consuming task. This forum includes a neat feature where you can 'view active topics'. This will allow you to review all the topics which have either been created (or replied to) since you last logged on to the website. The 'View active topics' button is situated on the top left hand side of every page of the forum, just under the blue LNER logo. It is the button I always press first when I visit the site.
To reply to an existing topic, you once again navigate to the relevant sub-forum and open the desired topic. You do this by simpply clicking on the title of the topic that interests you.
Once you have opened a 'topic', you will see what is termed the 'thread' of discussion. All the comments to this opening post will be saved underneath in chronological order for you to read. You can then add a reply yourself by simply clicking on the 'post reply' button. You then fill in all the relevant text boxes, and click 'submit'. Your reply will be added to the end of the thread, which is arranged in chronological order. An individual response within a 'thread' is called a 'post'.
When threads get very long and have several people chipping in, it can be difficult to make it clear if you want to respond to a specific post that went before you. A useful tool to avoid this problem is to use the 'quote' function to reply to a specific post. All you have to do is click the 'quote' button at the bottom of the post you are responding to. This then copies the other members message in to your own. You can then reply as normal. Using this format makes it very clear which comment you are replying to, but be mindful that with over-use it can make things very convoluted indeed- many fora are ruined by people quoting a quote of a quote and so on.... Used sparingly however, it is very useful to make things clearer.
Anyway, that should get you going. You can play around a lot with adding files and photographs, and any user on here will be very willing to talk you through that, as and when the need arises!
I think Richard should be praised for keeping LNER.info simple. A certain popular UK railway modelling forum which I shall not name seems hell-bent on becoming so complicated that even someone like me, (who spends the working day staring at a computer, doing modestly technical work), despairs! All I would say is over-complicating a forum is not clever, and it's certainly not funny!
Will
