First of all welcome to Teensay and I hope you have a good time, to make getting used to the site a bit easier I have created a guide to help you along the way by customising your account and showing you the basic functions of the forum.

- Markeh

Contents

1 - Setting up your profile

2 - Setting your Avatar (Picture below your name)

3 - Setting up a signature

4 - Posting in a forum

5 - Basic tag functions

6 - Sending Personal Messages

7 - Changing your Teensay Theme


Chapter 1 - Setting up a profile

Once you have created your Teensay Account, you'll want to let people know more about you without having to post a huge paragraph about your life, the easiest way to do this is to set up your Profile. To do this you'll have to access your "My Controls " which is at the top right next to "View new posts" it's in bold so I hope you won't have trouble finding it. Once you click this it will take you to a scary looking page with controls all about your account, on the left you have your menu bar, go down until you see the section "Personal Profile" and click the first button entitled "Edit Profile Details". This brings up a page which allows you to add your Member Title, Date of Birth, MSN address, Interests, Gender, Location, Age Etc. which will be shown under your name each time you post. Note : Only a few will be shown every time you post and the others will be in your profile when people click your name.

Chapter 2 - Setting up an avatar

Next I'm sure you'll want a funky looking unique Avatar (Which is the name of the picture below your name which you see everytime you post); To do this you'll need to get a picture you want as your avatar to be on your computer; Although Teensay will resize pictures to make them fit, some will get pixelated and ones with writing may not be clear, so its best to choose just a small sized picture that you like. Next you'll need to upload your picture onto the internet, unless its already on a website, you can upload it using http://www.photobucket.com/ all you need to do is register and you will be able to upload tons of cool pics, it's pretty easy to use so I won't go into detail. When your account is activated go into your album and click "Browse" and select your picture and then click "Submit", it's usually better to make sure the picture is a JPEG to save space. Once uploaded it will be added to your album, and underneath the picture there will be three links - URL - TAG and IMG, for your avatar you'll need to copy the whole of the URL one, then go into "My Controls" in Teensay scroll down to "Personal Profile" and click on "Edit avatar settings". Now all you need to do is paste your URL link you copied into the "Enter a URL to an online avatar image" box and click update avatar. This will now set your picture as your avatar.

Chapter 3 - Setting up a signature

Your signature is the writing/picture that appears below each of your posts, its usually some quotes, song lyrics, links or a picture. This is a very easy thing to set up, click on "My Controls", Below "Personal Profile" click "Edit Signature", this will bring up a box similiar to the ones you post in. Simply add what you want to this box and click "Update Signature" and it will appear below each posts - For adding pictures, Quote boxes and colours, skip to Chapter 5 - Basic Tag Functions.

Please note : Signatures must be 400*150 in pixel size for pictures and must be less than 100kb when combined with your Avatar, use JPEG to keep picture sizes to a minimum.

Chapter 4 - Posting in a forum

Now that you have all your details and pictures in place you'll want to post, to get to the list of forums avaliable click "Teensay.co.uk Message Boards" below where it says who's logged in, this will bring up a list of forums you can post in, being a member a few are restricted to you. First of all you'll be wanting to introduce yourself so it would be a good idea to post in "The Newbinator" to let everyone know you've arrived. Simply click on the name of the forum and that will bring up a list of all the topics created in this forum. You can open a topic by clicking on the name, but you'll be wanting to create your own topic all about you! Click the "New Topic" button just in the centre of the page above all the topics, this will bring up a page similiar to the signature box. All you need to do now is type a topic title, a topic description and whatever your going to say in your first post. There's smileys you can add to your left and there's even more if you click "Show all" below them, once your happy with your first post click "Post new topic" and everyone will be able to see and reply to your topic.

Once posted you'll be able to see what you've written and hopefully one of our lovely members will have welcomed you, now i guess you'll want to reply to them, its really easy, just click the reply button on the bottom right of their post and it'll bring up the box to type your message in, along with what they said quoted, if you don't want to quote what they said just go to the top of the page and click "Add reply" instead.

To check all the newest and hottest topics, click the "View new posts" button next to "My Controls" and this will show a list of all the newly replied to topics from all the forums, this is the easiest way to make sure you don't get stuck looking at the same forum.

Chapter 5 - Basic tag functions

You'll notice when your posting a message there's buttons above your post which can be used to make your writing go bold etc. to adding pictures to your posts, these are called Tags, they are really badly used by you new people, so listen up. Lets have a scenario of you wanting to make "Hello!" into a few different things...

The top line of icons from left to right are - Bold, Italics, Underline, Font, Size and Colour. When you want to make "Hello!" bold, click on the bold button and it will bring up "[ b ] Hello!" now thats the tag open and anything after that [ b ] will become bold, but you just want "Hello!" made bold so you will have to click the button "Close all tags" which is the last button on the top row of your tags. This will close it so that only "Hello!" has been made bold which is usually "[ / b ]". This works with all the top row of Tags, some are drop down menu's but will work exactly the same.

The second row of icons are from left to right are - Hyperlink, Picture, Email Address, Quote and Code. These are quite simple to use, for the hyperlink, email address and image you just need to click on what you want and they will ask for a URL or E-mail address of what your adding, For instance you can add your MySpace to a post in hyperlink form by clicking on "http ://" and typing it in, then it will ask you to label the hyperlink so just say something like "MySpace", when people click "MySpace" they will be sent to your website. same with the E-mail only when clicked it will bring up outlook express and try and send you and email, the Quote and Code tags work exactly the same to the top row of Tags, Simply click them and add what you want then close then once you are done. Finally there is the Image button, Once clicked it will ask for a URL of the image you want to upload to your post, using the Photobucket account you created you can upload any picture to your post by using the same method as you did with adding an avatar.

Chapter 6 - Sending a personal message

Now that you'll have made friends, you might want to whisper them something only they can hear, you can do this by finding a post by them and clicking their name, this will bring up their profile and you can have a sneaky peek at what they have in their profile, there's a box in the middle right called "Communicate" you will want to click "Send Personal Message" below it. This will bring up yet another box just like you making a new topic, add the Message title and what you want to say, then send away! when you get a new personal message a box will appear saying you have a message from "x" and it will say "1 New Messages" next to your "My Controls" button.

Chapter 7 - Changing your Teensay theme

We're just about done to let you roam the boards knowing enough to get you around the site, before we can let you do that it would be nice to show you how to change your theme of Teensay, at the moment there are 3 "skins" being the Blue, Red and Blue Depth. To change the skin scroll right to the bottom of the page and on the left there will be a drop-down menu saying "Default: Blue" click it and select the Theme that sounds nice to you, it will automatically change and bring up the boards.


Well, I think thats enough information to keep any newbie out of trouble for a while have fun and have a laugh.

A few tips before you go -

- Shorthand is frowned upon.
- Avoid posting in the wrong forums.
- Excessive spam is bad.

Good Luck!

- Markeh.