How to Navigate on the Prospero OB (Official Board) by Astriana

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How to Navigate on the Prospero OB (Official Board)

POSTED BY: ASTRIANA
UPDATED: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 14:30
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Wednesday, June 23, 2004 3:46 AM

Here are some thoughts on how to navigate over at the OB, should you choose to go there.

From FlyHead on the OB:
http://forums.prospero.com/foxfirefly/messages?msg=12375.1

Greetings all you new people! We are extremely pleased that you have joined us! We have been waiting for you. ;)
I thought you might like a little information about board navigation & some helpful tips on using this forum.

FINDING MESSAGES TO YOU

If you look in the left hand column, you will likely see a white bar. Above it are the words "Show Discussions...." And the white bar probably says "with Unread Msgs". This is actually a 'pull down' menu. See the little arrows at the right side of the white bar? Click on the arrows & you get more options for viewing messages. One is "unread Messages to Me". It is a very popular option & gives you a list of all the messages that are either posted directly to you. Also, if anyone hit the reply button on one of your posts & addressed it to someone else, it should show up too. For short we call it UMTM. You will become addicted to it & when it isn't working, which happens occasionally, you will be very frustrated! Added by Astriana: This function also works for finding threads you've "Recently Seen," "of High Interest" (a tag you can place on a particular thread by click on the appropriate button at the bottom of the screen), "of Unread High Interest," etc. Check out all the Show Discussions options and see which works best for you.

FINDING MESSAGES POSTED BY OTHER (including CAST MEMBERS)

Once again, look in the left hand column....up near the very top. See the words "Advanced Search"? If you click on that, the area to the right of your screen will become options for conducting searches here in the forum. When you use the top section (specific words), any info you can provide in the middle section will help your search. Just be sure to hit the "search" button next to the 'specific words' & not the button under section 2.

To find a message left by a particular forum member, use the middle section. In the far right area of the "FROM" row, type in the person's exact forum name. To see every possible message from this person, set the time parameter as "From the beginning of time" to "Today" in the time pull down menus. Then hit the search button in this section.

Firefly celebrities you might want to check out include:

JOSS_WHEDON
ADAM_BALDWIN (Adam's a regular so search results will be large!)
NATHAN_F
VDODGY1 (Mark Sheppard/Badger)
AFFABLECHAP (Chris Buchanan, Pres of ME & all around nice guy & hottie)

(That's all I know right off the bat. The rest of you will have to provide me with the others & I will edit this message.)

STARTING NEW THREADS

You can see in your left hand column that we have various folders here. They include "General Firefly Discussions", "Off-Topics", "Polls", "Cast".... Try to post any threads not dealing specifically with Firefly in "Off-Topics" or possibly one of the other folders, but never the "General Firefly Discussion". We try to keep that strictly FF, if we can.

To start a new thread, just click "Post New" at the top of your left column. You should be able to figure out the rest.

CHOOSING WHO YOU WANT TO POST TO

When you hit "reply" at the bottom of a post, you are taken to a screen where you can type your message. This message will automatically be posted "TO" the person who posted the message you clicked on. HOWEVER, it doesn't have to be. Their name is also in a pull down menu. Click the arrow to the right & you wll see a list of names that includes recent participants in the thread & those who have just logged into the forum. You can choose anyone from that list. Also a general "ALL" appears as an option in the list.

If the person you want to post 'to' is not in the pull down menu, click the word "OTHERS" & type the correct name in space provided.

PROFILES

If you click any member's name in the green bar above a post, it will take you to that person's profile. There you can learn a little more (maybe!) about them. Their are three sections in the profile; Main, Favorites & Personal. Click on any's name in green & you see different stuff.

If you click your own name, you can add or edit information in your profile. If you don't add info, our Profile Policeman, Freesoup, will ask you to "sex up your profile". It's not dirty. We just want to be able to read more about you.

When you click on your profile, look for "My Prefs". That gives you some various options. The most important is to set the thing to show you 20 posts in a thread at once in scroll form. Otherwise, you see only one at a time. That takes for ever.

ilovejayne added these "handy things":

In the top right corner of every post, there is a set of numbers (XXXXX.XX in reply to XXXXX.XX).

Clicking on the first number will refresh the entire board, and update the address bar in your browser.

If you click on the second number, the "in reply to", it will take you back to whatever post the current one is responding to. This is very helpful in lengthy political discussions, or the 'loon.

Po1s added:

Now, it's been a really loooong time since I was new, but one thing I remember is that when you first get on the board, you're in a mode where you can't necessary see all the options Flyhead is talking about here. So look around for something called--I believe it's called Advanced View or something like that, and click on it when you find it. It will open a whole new world....

And FlyHead responded:

When you click on your profile, look for "My Prefs". That gives you some various options. The most important is to set the thing to show you 20 posts in a thread at once in scroll form. Otherwise, you see only one at a time. That takes for ever.

And now, a tidbit from me:

If all the above fails, or you're still confused, you can do what I did when I first arrived at both FFF.net and the OB - just click on everything until you get the hang of it!

~Astriana~
Goddess of Inter-Board Diplomacy

...I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

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Wednesday, June 23, 2004 5:21 AM

LIZ

thanks! that helps alot!
i'm registered as liz919 over there now.

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Wednesday, June 23, 2004 5:31 AM

ASTRIANA

You're quite welcome! And good for you! Isn't it lovely to be a member of such wonderful groups?

~A~
Goddess of Inter-Board Diplomacy

...I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

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Wednesday, June 23, 2004 10:07 AM

LIZ

indeed!

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Thursday, June 24, 2004 11:02 AM

ASTRIANA

Bumping this for the new folks...

I suppose now that browncoats.serenitymovie.com is up, I'll just have to write a new thread for how to navigate there, too...

~A~
El Jefe Magnifico's Mistress... of Communications and Harems...

...I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

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Tuesday, May 17, 2005 10:04 AM

EMBERS

here I am resurrecting an old thread,
I've been having problems at the OB and this post was REALLY helpful!
thanks!

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Tuesday, May 17, 2005 2:30 PM

MSCKAREN

I think one important addition would be about movie spoilers. People at the OB tend to be a little more spoiler-phobic than other fan sites so beware as you discuss the trailer or movie (if you've attended a prescreening.

They do not have programming to highlight the spoilers. Proper etiquette at the OB for spoilers is to put the term SPOILERS in the heading PLUS at the start of EVERY post as they get what they call "flashes" over there. A flash would be a post that comes up on the screen there that you didn't seek out - it just popped up. That happens sometimes and woe be to you if you posted spoiler info without appropriate warning and SPACE.

After you warn of SPOILER BELOW, you want to put in a lot of space to allow a person to jump out of your post without accidently "blinding" themselves with spoiler info. To do this you will need to hit the enter button and some kind of character button for each line of space.

Yes this is a lot of work so you're best off to keep spoilers here or in the yahoo spoiler group or at the UB (for those brave adventurers who frequent that board).

Anyway...just saying...be careful with the spoilers. OB folks are very nice 99% of the time UNLESS you SPOIL them or disagree with them in a Political thread...but that's a whole separate story....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Appears they've canceled the show and we're still here. What does that make us?"
"Big damn junkies, Sir!"
"Ain't we just."

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