New to forums? Here are some of the mysteries explained!

This is the place where we explain all the things you never knew you wanted to know about forums!

Posts

A post is a public message that you leave on a forum. It’s public in that it can always be seen by some other forum members. And unless it is posted on a private board, it can be seen by the wider public too. Many of our members find us because google displays some of our posts in the search engine results.

There are two ways to post. You can reply to a post made by someone else or, you can make your very own brand new post!

Threads

Every time someone creates a brand new post it starts a new ‘thread’ and all the replies to it are stored in that thread.

You’ll find the names of the different threads listed under each ‘board’ (just coming to that!)

Boards

Boards are a place where we group similar threads together. For example ‘puppies’ boards is mostly threads about puppies.

It’s common for newcomers to sometimes post threads on the wrong board (oops) but that’s fine, a staff member can move those if necessary

Forum list (boards list)

The forum list is where you’ll find all the boards listed in one place so that you can easily find the topics that interest you.

On this forum the forum list is also the home page - it’s where you land if you just type the forum name into your browser. don’t forget to save the forum in your favorites!


Forum software

Forum software is the clever content management system that arranges all your posts neatly into threads and displays all the right threads (hopefully) in the right places!

There are only a few popular types of forum software and we’ve tried several of them over the years. We’ve now settled on Xenforo, as it seems to be reliable and fairly easy to use.

We occasionally upgrade our forum software to keep it running smoothly, but we’ll let you know when we do that.

Mostly it just runs nicely behind the scenes so we can all have fun!