Tweaking your IMDb experience
Want to see a trick? I can quote someone's question before answering it --
"Anyone? Anyone? Brian, I'm starting to think we're the only ones who are going to try this message board stuff!"
(This was a simple cut and paste with quote marks of course.)
But the IMDb software has lots of Markup Codes, one of which is putting a quote into a special box like this:
Anyone? Anyone? Brian, I'm starting to think we're the only ones who are going to try this message board stuff!
Then your answer appears below it.
Lots of ways to manipulate your text.
And use emoticons, too.
( That is, if you don't find them too juvenile to use. ..... )
For a printed guide on how to do it, you just click on the link that says "markup enabled". (This is a link that you'll find just above the text box you type into when creating a post.)
Or you can click here to see what I'm talking about: http://us.imdb.com/help/boards/markup
To do these kinds of pyrotechnics you use brackets.... [].
And the choice of code that goes inside the brackets will change the text.
Like this: http://www.us.imdb.com
I can make that a clickable link by putting encoded brackets before and after the text that I want to manipulate:
http://www.us.imdb.com
In that case I typed in [url]http://www.us.imdb.com[/url] But when the post is made, the bracketed code disappears and the text becomes altered. (Don't ask me how I was able to just demonstrate that bracketed code here without it then going on and doing it's job ... that will come in Lesson #3 ("How to bypass the censor filters and cuss to your heart's content")
Now then, you might enjoy the boards more if you go into your Profile and change some of the default parameters to a more user-friendly type.
See up there near the top of the screen? There are several clickable links:
Main Boards | Search | FAQ | Terms & Conditions | Help
My Profile | Favorites | Friends | Private Messages | Log Out
Click on the one that says My Profile and you can change the color scheme to your preference so the text might be more easy on the eyes.
You can also create a Biography for yourself. And a Signature that would appear at the bottom of all your posts. (That's how I get those colored lines at the bottom of my messages ... I'm probably the only person who has a nonverbal signature.)
Once in the PROFILE, look at DISPLAY OPTIONS:
"Default Sort" can be changed to "Active threads first"
(this will make more sense on the main message boards where there's a higher volume of posting going on; but essentially this setting will keep the most recent conversations at the top of your screen)
"Text Display" shows how you want your view of the messages to be arranged, in number of characters per column and in number of rows.
"Threads on a Page" comes in handy again when you're in the main message boards. Instead of viewing only 10 or 20 topics at a time, I have mine set to view 50.
"Display threads" as: threaded, flat, inline, nested.
(You'll learn what these terms are with experience. Try viewing a large conversation by the different methods and see which one suits you as a default. I prefer "threaded" to get an overview of who's talking to who. But you can't read all the posts at once, just one at a time. If you want to see all replies at once, click on Nested. Flat also shows everything at once but not as organized as Nested.
And last is "Theme". There are several choices of color schemes. Click on "samples" to check them out.
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