Welcome to the new forums!

Welcome to the new forums, now powered by Beast. This forum software isn’t based around a mail gateway in the same way as the old one, so you’ll notice it’s much more like a traditional lightweight Web-based forum and much less like a Web view of a newsgroup.

Post formatting is done with Textile just like news comments, Wiki pages and bug tracker entries. When you post new topics, reply to discussions or edit posts you’ve made, you can find brief formatting help displayed under the text input box along with a link to the Textile quick reference page.

Quoting of parts of other people’s messages isn’t done in the traditional e-mail sense with leading “>” characters. Instead, you must manually select short lines or single paragraphs and quote them with the “bq. ” command – i.e. press “Return” to start a new line, type in “b”, “q” and ”.”, press “Space”, then paste in the text you want to quote. You must quote separate paragraphs individually.

Quoted text looks like this.

Since that’s a bit fiddly, I may find time in future to add the ability to quote old messages directly using formatting similar to the all of the old posts that have been imported into this new forum. For now though, you’ll need a browser which supports text cut and paste for this to work, such as Netsurf (click and drag with the mouse to select text, the press Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste).

Beast includes Gravatar support, for those rare moments when the Gravatar site isn’t down ;-) – this is how come I have a logo next to my name in posts. You can set up a visible avatar using the e-mail address you registered with the ROOL site and this will be displayed on the forum. No image rating is specified, so your default image will be selected (Gravatar uses a ratings scheme similar to that used to indicate suitable viewing ages for films).

Notification of changes is done through RSS feeds – see the little orange icons scattered throughout. You can watch topics for changes; use the small check box and “Set” button at the top of a particular topic view. In the sidebar under “Options” there is a link containing your user name when logged in. If you follow this, you can find a list of all the posts you made, or all posts made by other people in topics you are watching (your “monitored” list). RSS feeds are available for both. You are also able to find the same information for any other forum user by following the link made from their name in one of their posts, so you can keep track of things written by authors in which you have an interest or form ad hoc groups of people watching a particular topic.

To prevent any further delays to the forum being live, I’ve elected to conduct only very brief testing with a narrow range of browsers. If you spot any problems, please report them using the bug tracker.

Enjoy!

Any chance of using an RSS format that Sargasso can handle?

What’s Sargasso? :-)

If you can tell me what’s up with the format, I’ll have a look at modifying the XML template(s). I’ve so far ignored the RSS side of things because it “just seems to work” though there’s still a user name error on some feeds that needs fixing (some show an internal MD5’d name, rather than a human readable one). So if I’m going to be working on the feeds for one thing, I may as well look at the other at the same time.

http://zamez.org/sargasso or http://zamez.org/sargasso2 for the version rewritten in C. Forum feeds work fine with the latter – no idea about the former.

quoting with > characters appears to work OK too.

So you don’t need to bother with bq.

I’ll try that on a multi-line sample (just putting “>” in front of each line):

help displayed under the text input box along with a link to the Textile quick reference page.

Quoting of parts of other people’s messages isn’t done in the traditional e-mail sense with leading “>” characters. Instead, you must ma

Yep, looks good. Well spotted! :-) Means the implementation of a “Reply with quote” button should be that much easier. You’ll get attributions for replies that way too.

Though I’m not sure about that shade of green…