The Gladiatus.US Board Community

Introduction
In this Tutorial, I will tell you how to use this Board. It consists of 8 parts:
Part I - Introduction, Registrations & Important Words
Part II - Homepage
Part III - Visiting a (Sub)Forum
Part IV - In a Thread/Topic
Part V - Writing a Post
Part VI - User CP

Registrations
If you visit the Board for the first time, then you will have to register before you are allowed to post messages in any part of the Board. To do so, click the button you will see at the left side of the Top navigation. Once you clicked the button, a text will come up. Please read it carefully, then click 'Accept' to continue the registration. To make sure you read it, you cannot click the 'Accept' button before 10 seconds have passed.
You will now get to see a new page. You have to fill in the 5 fields located at the top, 'Username', 'Email Adress', 'Password', 'Confirm Password' and 'Security Measure' to be able to register on the Forum. You will have to enter a real emailadress since the confirmation email will be sent there. Even though you are registered, you will not be able to post until you have activated the emailadress you have provided with us when you registered.

Important Words

I have heard about 'Registering' and 'Logging in', what's the difference?
You only have to register, and as such activate your email, once for the entire board. After that, you can just login with your username and password. The Board will automatically log you in every time you visit the board, as long as you do not clear the cookies. Of course, you can also choose to disable this function in your User CP.

What exactly are a 'Thread', a 'Topic' and a 'Reply'?
A Post is actually anything written by the users on this entire board. For example, what I am currently writing is in a Post. A collection of these posts, for example the Board Tutorial all together is called a 'Topic' or a 'Thread'. The latter two are just the same, where a reply is only one post, as an answer to the first post made in a Topic.

What is a Warning?
A Warning on the Board means you have done someting which is against the rules, and a Moderator has noticed. By 'The Rules', we mean the Board Rules which are important everywhere on the Forum, but the Subforum Rules for the specific Subforum you are posting in too. Normally, you will be banned once you receive three warnings, but if we notice you did something terrible, like making rasictic posts, we will not hesistate to ban you right after the first warning. Decisions about this shall be made by the Board Administration only. More about Warnings can be found in Part VII of this Tutorial.

What is a PM?
PM stands for Private Message. It is a message you can send to any other user on the Board, and nobody but this user will be able to read it, as long as he/she doesn't forward it. You can send PMs by clicking the PM button: .
More about PMs will be said in part VI.

I. The Buttons At the Top of the Forum

For All Users

- Clicking this button will show you some of the users. You can decide to show only those starting with a specific letter, and you can sort them on different options, for example Registration Date and Total Posts.

- This is where you can find all GladiatusCom Teammembers. For the forum, you will have to know about four ranks, being these:

>>> Quaestors [Trial BoardModerators]
They are recognisable because of their green italic color and the stars displayed underneath their name ( )
They have the same jobs as their non-trial counterparts, but are still, as their name says, in trial. Once they have been appointed a Forum and have shown their activity, they will be promoted to full Moderators.

>>> Aedils [BoardModerators]
They are recognisable because of their green color and the stars displayed underneath their name ( )
The BoardModerators look after the forums they are assigned to. They close, give out warnings and edit threads. When you think a moderator closed a thread too early, write a PM to the Mod who closed it. The Moderators are the ones who should visit the board the most, and the ones you'll usually see giving out warnings.

>>> Praetors [Super BoardModerators]
They are recognisable because of their bolded green color and the stars displayed underneath their name ( )
SMods have the rights Moderators have but in all forums. The SMod takes care of all the Moderators assigned to them. When you have a complaint about a Mod, you may send the complaint to the SMod. SMods are also quite able of removing your sig or even banning your entire account from the forum, if no BoardAdmin is available to do so. They can also change your user title (for special reasons only) and username.

>>> Consuls [Board Administrators]
They are recognisable because of their bolded green color and the stars displayed underneath their name ( )
The Board Administrators are managing admins on the board. They add forums, ban users or give/take access rights. They also pick new Board Mods to help you out with any problems you might encounter on our board and change the Forums settings. They, however, cannot help you with a complaint about the game itself. You should not be contacting them with a simple problem Moderators can help you with as well
.
- This button is your friend. Use it to find any topics regarding your own problem, and save everybody some work and yourself some warnings by doing so!

- Some more questions about using this Forum are answered in here. Maybe even most important of all, the User Ranks are shown here - so don't come asking about those

- By clicking this button, you will be taken right into the Chatserver, if you have Java enabled. It leads directly to the OnlineGamesNet website, which requires Java to work.

- Unfortunately, the BoardModerators have to give out Warnings sometimes. To see which users have received a warning, and what have they received the Warning for, please click this button. You will also be able to visit the message they have been warned for, or see who warned them.

For Guests

- This button will allow you to register on the GladiatusCom Forums, and chat with all other users we have here. You will also not be able to reply to other users topics or send PMs as long as you are not registered.

For Members


The UserCP allows registered members to change some of their settings, like their Signature or their Avatar. I will explain more about the User CP later on.


This button allows you to read your PMs, and it allows you to send PMs yourself or see if your PM has already been read or not.
Underneath the buttons, you will see 2 bars of text, provided your logged in. One of them will tell you some things about the time and who you are (Like you don't know...), it should look like this:

Quoted

'Welcome back, Transfixer [logout]
New posts, since your last visit: Today, 16:00. The time is now 16:18.
All times are in GMT +1 hours.'

The other bar should state some information about how many PMs you have and how many you already read. The 'Inbox' link which should be there will also take you to your Inbox. The text underneath it should look like this:

Quoted

You have 0 new messages (0 unread, 126 total messages).

Even lower, the actually forum is that. By clicking where you want to go, you should be able to navigate through there.

Once visiting a Forum, you will lose the Main overview and its bars. The buttons will stay though, and right underneath the buttons, you will see the Navigation Bar. This will look like this:

Quoted

Gladiatus » ~ Gladiatus ~ » FAQ & Guides

This shows which forum you are currently visiting. On the right, it will show this text:

Quoted

» Hello <Accountname> [Logout]

This is not very special, but it allows you to logout very fast any moment you'd want to. Underneath this, you'll see some forum options. These are:

1. 
   
   
2. Add Forum to Favorites - This option allows you to 'bookmark' the forum. You will be notified by either PM or email when a new thread is started inhere. We don't recommend using this on 'normal' forums, like the Help & Questions Area, but we do recommend using it on forums like 'Placards' or 'FAQ & Guides'.
   
   
3. Mark Forum as Read - This will allow you to mark all posts in the Forum as read, then enabling you to see a new thread has been written on the Homepage more easily again. This will prove useful when, for example, returning after a night.
   
   
4. - This button allows you to start a new thread in the section. For example, in the Help & Questions » Game Area, you could start a new thread about one of your Questions...
   After using the Search button, ofcourse. Underneath the Navigation Bar, you will be able to see which Moderator is responsible for this part of the Forum.
   This will look like: 'Moderated by: John Clark, Transfixer'. Ofcourse, both are able to Moderate every forum, but they are there as contact for you, and are the ones you can report messages violating the rules to. Then, you'll reach the part where the Threads are located. Here, at the top, the Announcements are listed. They contain useful information regarding the Subforum or the entire Board (For example, the Beginners Guide).
   One can also see the 'Important' threads, which contain information about this forum only. (For example, in the 'Help and Questions, Game' area, ALL Quest related Questions) Underneath this is the part where you can actually see your threads, after posting it. This is where the current active threads are listed. You can see how many people viewed it, how many of those replied, who was the original author, and who replied last.
   You can also see a number of either Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down, showing how users rate this topic. You are not able to reply in topics marked with a 'Closed' symbol, and you should not be able to reply in any Announcement either. To any other topics, you can reply when entering the topic. I will explain more about this in my next post.

In a thread, you will have several options. The most important is to reply to the Topic, I will handle this in the next post. In this post, I will be explaining other functions you can encounter in a Topic.

User Fields
At the left of the thread, you'll always see some information about users. This is what you can encounter there:

The Username
At least as important as any other thing you are going to encounter in a thread, are the User Names. They are used to see which user posted a reply or started the Topic. If a Moderator or GameOperator or any other teammember posted in a topic, his name will have a specific color (Green / Orange), and he can as such easily be recognised by just looking at the Username.

The Rank Title & Rank Image
Ranks are usually earned by making useful posts on the Forum. Your post count will raise, and you will receive a new rank. The ranks you can get are shown here: Rank Title/Images Overview. Rank Titles can be given by the BoardAdministration, but Rank Images cannot. Staff Members can be recognised because they use White or Gray stars. Posthunting to get a 'higher' rank is not allowed and will be followed by a warning, or in extreme cases a ban.

The Avatar
An Avatar is a small image every user can upload to show in every of their posts, right underneath their User Rank. They are, next to the User Name, used to recognise users from others. As such, copying another members' avatar shall not be tolerated by the Moderators team, except if the Avatar is offered free to use by the BoardAdministration. You will be able to see so in your UserCP if this is the case.

Registration Date
This one is clean and simple. It shows when a user has been registered on the Board, and can in no way be set by either users or Administrators.

Posts
This shows how many posts a user has made on the Board. However, our Board is set in such a way that it will refuse to count posts made in any Spam section, or posts which have been moved to the Archive. If we encounter spam posts, we'll move them to the Archive to prevent your user rank from becoming 'higher' than it should be.

Location
Users can set this option themselves in their profile. Normally, users would put the Country or City they live in, but, as you can see if you look at mine, you can put something entirely different there (No, I do not actually live in the H&Q Area). Thread Options In a Thread, you have several things you can do with (your own) posts. I will explain a bit about them here. Reply This button allows you to write a Reply to the thread. It appears in every post, but it appears on the bottom of the Thread too. Quote You can decide to Quote a post to make it more clear what you're replying to. You will get the original post and will be able to add something just like writing a Reply. Make sure not to quote a quoted quote though, creating a quoted quote pyramide (Get why this could be annoying?)

Edit You can Edit your own posts within an hour. Moderators or other Board Staff can edit anybody's posts, for as long as they want too. This is required, so they are able to remove things like Recruit Links.

Report This button might very well the most important one you can encounter, if you use it wisely. You can use it to report posts which don't quite match with the Board Rules to the Moderators. Once you hit the Report Button, a new window will be opened. You get a dropdown box allowing you to choose between any Moderator to report to. Best would be to, if you're able to, NOT choose the Administrators, but choose (Trial) Moderators instead. They are quite capable of handling reports. You must provide a reason for the report, and reporting too many posts where you shouldn't can get yourself warned. Contact Options These are shown right underneath a users posts, and are the following:

• shows the user who wrote the post is online, shows he/she is either offline or in Ghostmode.
• The function allows you to write an email to the user, without knowing his/her emailadress.
• shows the users website. Watch out, it might be a Muglink.
• gives the possibility to write the user a PM on the Board itself, not visible to any others.
• adds the user to the Buddy list, which actually has no use at all.
• allows you to Search for all the users posts, as long as they were made in public forums
• , and allow you to get user contacts for respectively MSN, AIM and YIM

Okay, so now you know how to visit a Forum and even how to visit a Thread. However, an important part of the Forum is to contribute to it with your own messages. To do so, you can either start a Thread of your own or Reply to another users Thread. Please remember you have to be registered for any of these options.

When you hit either the New Thread ( ) button or the Reply ( ) button, you will get a new menu, in which the following things will be important:

Subject

When writing a new thread, you must specify something in this Thread. Even more important, it should be something that states what the topic is about. For example, I could've used 'READ ME NOW' as topic title, but that doesn't explain what the topic is about, and can therefore be warned. Titles like 'Board Tutorial' or 'Question about Signature' do state what the topic is about, and these are ment to be used. You can also title your reply, but this is not required. Ofcourse, the Rules stated above affect posting a reply just as they affect posting a new thread.

Icon

You can use an Icon to show what you think about the thread or reply your are making. For example, you could use the icon if you're upset about a bug you encountered. The icon will then be shown at the left of your Threadname in the Forum Overview.

Message Field

This is where you actually write the message. You will have a lot of options regarding the lay-out though, as you might already have noticed when reading this Tutorial. You can use either the Fields right above the message field, or you can use BBCode to post your message. To see which BBCodes are available on this Forum, click here.

FONT

The Font allows you to change the font you're writing in. You can either click the FONT button and select the font you want to be writing in, or you can use this code:



This will look like this:

Quoted

This is an example text.

SIZE

The Size allows you to make your text either a lot bigger or a lot smaller. We do not advise changing the SIZE unless you really need too - We may have to warn you for using big size, since it gets really annoying to read the message. You can either click the SIZE button and select the SIZE you want to be writing in, or you can use this code:



This will look like this:

Quoted

This is an example text

Color

The Color changes the Color you want to be writing in. You can either select the COLOR by using the COLOR Dropdown box, or you can use the [COLOR] box, in which case you can write in any hexidecimal code you'd want to. For example:



This will look like this:

Quoted

This is an example text

In the same way, you can use any of the following buttons. They should speak for themselves now that I have declared the first couple.

, , , , , , , , ,

Options

Furthermore, you can set some options for your thread. They can be located under the 'Options' tag. The options you see there should declare themselves without further explanation needed.

Attachments

If you need to add a Screenshot, do this here. This is especially useful in areas like the Art section, if you want to post your own collection to show to others.

You are now ready to post replies or start new threads on the Forum. Please remember to use the PREVIEW button BEFORE you post, to see if somebody else already posted what you wanted to post.

If you click the User CP ( ) Button, you will get into your User CP, where you have multiple options I'll explain here.

Edit Profile

This is the place where you can edit some of the information other users can view about you. All options stated here are optional, you do not háve to add information here. Your Gender and Location are stated in every single one of your posts, as explained in the 'In a Thread' Post.

Change Password

You can change the password to your BoardAccount here. To do so, you have to enter your current password, and the password you want as your new password (twice). Once you did this, the password will be reset.

Ignore List

The Ignore List is there to ignore other Users. If you ignored a User, he/she will no longer be able to send you Private Messages through the Forum. You cannot ignore a Gladiatus.us Staffmember.

Private Messages

This is the place which allows you to communicate with other users, thereby making sure nobody else can read the message.

Inbox

PMs which have been sent to you by other Forum users will be shown here. At the start of a title, you will find a Message Symbol, which will already give you some information. If the symbol is yellow ( ), you already read the message. If the symbol is red ( ), this indicates you have not yet read the message. Furthermore, you can see whether a message is a reply to one of your messages ( RE: ) or a forward of a message sent by somebody else ( FW: ). In your Inbox, you are furthermore able to see who sent you the message, when he sent it and what the message is about.

At the bottom of the page, you can select what you want to do with PMs. You can, for example, delete them or move them to another folder you created yourself.

There, the New PM button is located as well. Sending a PM works in the same way as writing a normal post (See post above this one). To send a new PM, use this button in your Inbox:

Edit Options

Use Ghost-Mode?

If you decide to enable Ghost-Mode, no other user on the Forum will be able to see you are online, exception made for the Board Team, which will be able to see hidden users as well. There is no way to make the Board Team think you're offline while you're actually online.

Remember me?

If you are using a public computer, please remember to set this option to No. On your own PC, you can simply leave it to yes, if nobody else uses it. Leaving this as Yes on a public computer might make sure you lose access to the account!

Can the Admins email you?

This is set to yes by default. However, if you do not want to be informed by email if the Administration has something important to tell its users, feel free to set it to No. Please remember though, the Gladiatus.us Forum will not send you spam messages.

Hide Email Address?

Set this to No if you do not want every user or Guest to have access to see your Email Address. After all, they'll still be able to mail you using the Formmailer, if you have this option enabled. Moderators will still be able to see your emailaddress.

Can members email you using the formmailer?

You can choose to make Members unable to email you at all. To do so, simply set this option to No. Please remember, even if you leave this at yes, members will not be able to see your Email Address unless you want to reply to their email.

Enable email notification by default?

We strongly advise you NOT to activate this. If you do activate it, every thread or reply you make will have email notification enabled, as such emailing you every time somebody replies to the thread. Your emailbox will be full sooner than you can say 'I shouldn't have done that' if you activate this option.

Would you like to receive a notification by Email instead of Private Message?

You can enable this to make sure you get a PM instead of an Email when a new post has been made in a Forum you have subscribed too.

Can members send you private messages?

Disabling this setting makes sure you can no longer receive PMs from anybody. If you just want certain users to no longer send you PMs, please use the Ignore List instead

Email notificication on new PM?

If you enable this, you will automatically receive an Email saying you received a new Private Message on our Gladiatus Board. This really helps if you do not accidently want to ignore a PM a user sent you.

Pop-Up on new PM?

This will give you a little pop-up noticing you you just received a new Private Message. No way you're accidently ignoring PMs now

__________________________________________________

I hope this little Guide will help you using the GladiatusCom Board in a nice and friendly way. If you still have questions, feel free to post in the Gladatius > Help & Questions > Board Area. If you have something I should add to this Guide, feel free to PM me

Updated 27.08.2008