Some people have been a little confused about what the different parts of the site are for and how to use them. Hopefully this will clear a few things up.

Contents

• What are the features for?
  • Groups
  • Forums
  • Activity
  • Your Profile
  • Events
• Posting images and videos on the site
• What is Members Only?
• Keeping Track of Everything
• Smileys

What are the features for?

Groups

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Groups are very similar to Facebook groups. They show that you are involved in the groups topic and allow you to see what other members are also involved. They also provide a wall for posting status updates about that topic.

They should not however, be used for discussing things about the topic, only for posting short updates about it in the form of statuses. For discussing topics, use the forums.

Forums

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The forums are where all discussion should take place. There are boards for every game as well as for general discussion, introducing yourself, videos, website, and off-topic. The forums are the place for asking questions about games, posting info about what you are planning or organising within games, discussing game feature, suggesting website features (on the website board), etc.

All members have the ability to post new topics on each of the boards, that other members can then reply to.

Topic tags must be separated by commas!

Activity

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The activity page is a stream of everything member related that happens on the site. You can filter what you see using the dropdown menu on the right.

You can also post status updates on your profile or any of the groups you are a member of from the top of the page.

See the “Keeping Track of What’s Happening” section below for more info about filtering only what you need to see.

Your Profile

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Activity

This is equivalent to your Facebook wall where you can post status updates.

Using the other tabs, you can also view status updates where people have @mentioned you, your favourite status updates, friends status updates, and group status updates.

Messages

This is where you can send and receive private messages with other site members. You may also see notices to all members here sometimes.

Events

You can see events that you have said you are attending here.

Achievements

Any achievements that you have unlocked will appear here.

Events

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Core Officers can post clan events and event details here. On an events details page, it should be possible to ‘book’ to say that you are attending the event, and to comment about the event. The time on events should be posted in both UTC and EST / EDT. If you notice that the time is wrong or not posted in both, make sure you let the author know .

Posting Images and Video on the site

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Posting on the forums

You can post images and videos on the forums using the bbCodes listed below. You can also attach files less than 512KB to topics and replies.

The curly brackets {} are not required. They just show where a variable goes.

Posting in status updates

You can embed Youtube videos in status updates by just posting the short “share” URL on it’s own line. It should automatically go to the correct width.

What is Members Only?

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The Members Only pages are:

• Achievements
• Activity
• Members
• Forums
• Forum Topics
• Events

The public pages are:

• Homepage
• Website guide
• Apply to Join
• Registering – Current TLN pages
• Groups
• All the game info pages
• Rules
• News
• Contact Us

Keeping Track of Everything

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Activity

The activity stream can easily become too cluttered with people accepting friends, getting achievements, joining groups, etc. to find the important stuff within  it all. This is why there is a drop-down to filter out all of this. The options that I recommend checking for the ‘All Members’  tab and ‘Friends’ tab are (sorted by priority):

1. Updates – this will show people status updates on their personal profiles and on all public groups.
2. Topics (not forum topics) – this will show topics sorted by when they were created. Please do not comment on these, but reply to the forum topic itself. To find out how to see topics sorted by freshness (most recent reply), see the next section.
3. Replies (not forum replies) – this will show replies to forum topics sorted by when the reply was made. Please do not comment on these, but reply to the forum topic itself.
4. Posts – If you can’t be bothered to check the ‘News’ page, use this filter for seeing recent news posts.
5. Comments – If you want to see recent comments on posts, events, and pages.

For viewing activity within groups that you are a member of from the ‘Groups’ tab (still on the activity stream), I recommend setting the filter to everything as everything should be relevant to you and it will primarily show updates.

Forums

For keeping track of what is going on in the forums there are a few methods, depending on what you are interested in.

If you are interested in everything that is going on, check the recent topics section of the sidebar that displays the 5 most recent topics. To see more go to the Community, Forums, Topics. This displays all topics regardless of what board they were posted in and sorts them by ‘Freshness’ (the time of the last reply to the topic). I recommend checking this page so that you don’t miss anything that you may be interested in or may be relevant to you.

If you are only interested in certain things, rather than everything, just check the relevant forum boards to see the topics for that board sorted by freshness. I wouldn’t recommend just doing this as people don’t always post topics in the correct place.

If you want to be notified of replies to a topic, click subscribe at the top of the topic and you will receive email notifications of replies.

Events

The best way of keeping track of events is to simply check the Events page or look at the calendar in the sidebar.

Please post a comment if you would like me to explain anything else.