Why am I writing this?
Recently, Brad Wardell (Frogboy) wrote an article about the main features of the new forums, and showed how powerful they were. Its a great new forum system in my opinion, and kudos to andrew_ for his amazing work on it. He's got some nifty little features implemented though, that most people dont know about... We discovered a few of them whilst chatting with andrew_ a few minutes ago in IRC, so I thought I would share.

Forum Navigation Arrows
Brad mentioned these in his article, but I'm going to mention again, because they are just THAT cool! Suppose you are in "Home > General > Site Issues" but want to get to "Home > General > Community"... whats the best way to get there? Since Community is also a sub-forum of General, you can just click on the arrow between General and Site Issues and a menu will pop up showing all subforums in that category, allowing you to easily hop around.


If you want more control, use the Advanced Mode
If you want more control over what you're posting in the forums, be it a new topic, or a reply in a thread, you can use the Advanced post editor to post in Pure HTML mode to give yourself maximum flexibility. Of course, the regular mode works just fine as well, but if you want to be able to fully control the guts of the post, go with HTML mode.

Post previews without going into the thread?
Heres a sneaky little bit of information I just learned... you dont have to go into a thread to get an idea of what its about. Sometimes titles are a little vague, so you have to actually click the title, read about it, then leave the thread again... but NOT ANYMORE! If you go to a list of threads, such as Recent Posts, and hold your mouse over an an empty area within a posts 'box'. You'll get a tooltip with the first line or two of the threads text. Less inefficient clicking and reading for all!


Grr! That thread title is chopped off at the end in the forum list!
Bummer about that... its probably even the most important word or nine thats cut off too! But what to do about it? Simple! Hover your mouse over the title of the thread, and the entire title, in all its glory, will be revealed in a simple tooltip. How handy is that? Very handy, I say!


Shrinking things down a little...
If you're in a list of threads, such as Home > General, you can click the little [-] button beside "Pinned Posts" and "Recent Active Posts" to contract those sections in that area. This setting doesnt carry across all sections though, which is handy. This means that you can minimize sections you're not interested in (such as the sticky posts in General > Community while leaving others visible).


What the heck can I do with all these RSS buttons?
Well, if you're a Firefox user, you're already in luck! Remember that rarely-mentioned Live Bookmarking feature? If you add one of those rss feeds as a Live Bookmark, you dont even have to go to the forums to see if your favourite thread has been updated! Just create a "Recent Posts" live bookmark, and then all you have to do is click on it, and it will show you a list of the most recent posts on the forums. Or, if you're feeling a little more specialized, you can add just the Home > OS Customization > DesktopX feed as a Live Bookmark. However you like it, its a great little feature!


(A little note to aspiring developers here... you could write an application to essentially build a bit of a front-end for the forums using just the RSS feeds, if you liked. They are generated pretty much instantly... could be a worthy project!)

Scroll to the bottom stuff...
It sounds lame... but alot of good might be served if you make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page if you find yourself feeling a little flustered as to a) where you are or what something means. Hiding down at the bottom of every page, there is a little footer that has a link to the forums most recent posts, current Stardock time (handy for figuring out how long ago a post was made since everything is Stardock time right now). Theres also buttons for deleting cookies set by the board, as well as the link to mark all forum posts as read. When you are in a thread list, the bottom stuff has not only a list to the sub-forums available, but also a 'icon' reference as to which posts you've read or not.

Well, there you have it!
Ta-da, some handy information about the forums. I'm going to try to update this as new features are added, or as I find more. Please, if you have any tips etc. that I missed, post them here! I would love to learn more about these forums, and if they can help new users to figure out how all this works a little bit quicker, then it would be great to work them into this article.