There are two ways to post.
First you can start your own topic. A new topic must have a subject and a body. The subject will be used to identify the topic in the topic list so it should be descriptive. The message is the message that you want the other members to read and respond to.
Second you can reply to an existing topic. Please try to make sure your reply has something to do with the original post. if not, you can start a new topic.
When replying, you have the option to include the message in your post or not. You can quote any post in the topic by clicking on the Quote button in the upper right hand. It usually makes sense to use the quote function if you are replying to only a part of a post. For example, if someone posted a topic with five questions in it and you are replying to only one question, then you can quote the post you are replying to and edit the quote so that only the question you are replying to is in your post.
For example:
| Jack wrote: |
| Will you be going to the NDSC convention? |
You can also edit your post after you have posted it to the topic. Once someone has responded to your post, we don't allow deleting because we have found that makes a thread confusing, but you can remove all the text from your post and just leave a little note signifying that you have deleted your comments.
Making Your Posts Look Fancy
Because of the risks of exposing the site to hackers, HTML can not be used when you post. However, you can still use many of the features of HTML by using BBCode (read the FAQ here]). BBCode will allow you to make your text bold, add italics or underlining, create lists, add images, and more.
In addition to BBCode, you can also use emoticons (usually referred to as smilies). Smilies are small pictures that re made by combining certain characters. For example, combining a colon : with a capital D, makes a smiling face icon
. The complete list of available emoticons can be found here.