In early 2007, Brad and I created the Temporary Airbrush Tattoo Forum, which is located at http://forum.tatstore.com/. It has grown to over 1,000 members and 8,000 posts. Today I will share some tips that will improve the forum experience for everyone.

Frequent Visitors

If you regularly check the forum to see what’s new, there are a few ways you can save time. For people that visit multiple times each day, the forum frontpage displays the 10 most recent posts. If you check back once per day, the “Today’s Posts” feature show displays everything you want. It can be found under “Quick Links” on the top toolbar. For people who check back often, but at irregular times, the “New Posts” feature is for you. It displays all new posts since your last visit and can be found either under “Quick Links” or below your avatar on the frontpage. With these browsing options, you can easily find threads of interest. Another cool trick is the option to subscribe to a thread. Under “Thread Tools” in the upper-right, you can subscribe to a thread updates by email and/or in your User CP.

Quoting Posts

This tip will help everyone who reads your posts. Many people add their post to the end of a thread using the post reply button. This does work, but can make your post hard to follow and take it out of context. For most situations, I want to recommend the quote button. Find the post on the thread you are replying to and click quote in the lower-right corner. You can leave or delete content between the [quote] boxes to further narrow the topic of your reply. You can also quote multiple posts by selecting the multi-quote buttons (to the right of the quote button) of the posts and then clicking the post reply at the top or bottom of the thread. This allows readers to see what and to whom you are addressing.

Interacting with Users

After reading a particularly helpful or well-written post, you can show your appreciation by adding to the author’s reputation. Giving reputation helps users gain trust in other forum contributors. You can give reputation by clicking on the scales in the upper-right corner of a post. You can determine a users reputation by looking in the upper-right of their profile or below their post count on any post. Reputation levels are marked by light green boxes, with none left as a grey box. If you have favorite contributors, you can add them to your buddy list to see when they are online and easily private message them.

New Features and Other Tips

If you have any tips, feel free to leave them in the comments. Also, if you have any ideas for features to add to the forum, please share and we will take them under consideration.