Writing on the new forums ...

HnRkLnXqZ.1870

... can be a little strange. Especially if you are used to the old version or any other board on the internet. Writing certain things like a guide or a detailed list turns out to be difficult and the formatting options are quite limited. But who am I telling this? There have been a few topics about this already. I do not want to complain here, I want to offer some alternatives until ANet gets the job done for good. I ran a few tests and tried out a lot of weird stuff over the past hours.

The good news: HTML seems to work.
Embedding pictures finally works. Thank you ANet!

Colorig Text:
<font color="red">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="green">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="yellow">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="orange">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="blue">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="brown">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="white">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="grey">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="black">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="pink">TEXT</font> = TEXT
<font color="purple">TEXT</font> = TEXT

Separating Text with lines
<HR>

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capital letters

#capital letters

Spoilers

This is a single-lined spoiler.

Underlined Text:
<u>TEXT</u> = TEXT

Aligning text to the center

<center>Aligning text to the center</center>

Text as link
<a href="www.guildwars2.com">Guildwars2</a> = Guildwars2

Tooltips
<cite title="Hello World!">Pumpkin</cite>
Update: This feature was silently removed from the forums. If you do that now, it just turns the target-text red. I think they do not like hidden messages. If you or anyone else edits the post, the code and the hidden text are still visible.

Tables
Those seem to work, but you cannot enable borders, what makes them look really weird. Creating a table is a bit complicated in my opinion. If you google for "html table editor" you can find excellent programs which create you the code so you only have to copy/paste it.
This is the most basic one I found so far: http://html-tables.com

Things I have tried out which not seem to work at all:

• embedding pictures
  EDIT: Embedding pictures was finally enabled at 10/11/2017.

• changing text size

• borders in general
• changing link color

Bugs I found so far:

• If you write a solid horizontal line, using several "-" in a row, it ends up the same as described above. But sometimes the text below will be written in capital letters without any format required and it is not possible to remove it.
• If you use the spoiler-tags and go to preview, it sometimes just shows a grey box on grey text. Once you save the post, the appearance changes to the traditional button-theme.

• The spoiler-tags use "[" and "]" while all other tags use "<" and ">"
  Combining these seems to cause some weird text glitches and shows some tags you have never written. Avoid doing that.

• Sometimes, text written below a spoiler disappears once you save the post. The instant you edit the post, the text re-appears again, but goes away when you save again.

If I run into a problem/obstacle, I try to solve it. If that does not work either, I improvise. I have not touched HTML for the last 15 years, but google helps a lot. Anyway, this is not a solution. A solution will come from the owners of this board, ANet. It will come, sooner or later and make this post obsolete. I am looking forward to it.

Danikat.8537

The software they're using is called Vanilla Forums. I've not looked into it in much detail yet but their site should have info on what is and is not possible and how to achieve it. Some features might require Anet to add plugins or might have been disabled (for example the Elder Scrolls Online forum also uses Vanilla and it's possible to embed pictures there) but it's a starting point at least.

AegisRunestone.8672

Thank you for this! Bookmarking now.

AegisRunestone.8672

I've got a tip to add!

So, when quoting people who do not have a space in their account name, you can still get the full effect of "pinging them." These forums have a natural tendency to not put double quotation marks around the full account name and number in a quote IF they don't have space. This is fixable by, when you quote a person who's name has no space, adding double quotes around their name.

For example, see below:

> @"Danikat.8537" said:
> Their post here.

Comes out to:

@Danikat.8537 said:
Their post here.

Note how this player's name is completely in red when I quoted it. Without adding the quotation marks, it comes out to this:

@Danikat.8537 said:
Their post here.

See the difference? Hope this helps!

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The Assassin of Rata Sum
Proud Member of Wards of the Mists [WARD]

Danikat.8537

I can confirm the method @AegisRunestone.8672 described worked - I got a notification to say I was mentioned in this post, which never normally happens when someone quotes me.