Welcome!

You’ve probably already figured out how to post a message, use the smiles and the image uploader, but just in case, here’s how it all works. We'd be delighted if you'd give it a try and let us know on this thread if you have any questions or problems

How to post a message
Post a message by pressing the ‘start new thread’ or ‘reply’ buttons on the forum, or going to the end of a thread, as you’d expect.

How to format a forum message
When you start a thread or add a new message, you have the following formatting buttons to use*:

(1) Bold, italics, underline, bullets, lists, undo, redo, cut, copy, paste: Just like Word

(2) Smilies: Click a smiley from the pulldown menu to insert it in the message. Hover over each smiley in the menu to see its description and its text equivalent.

(3) Links: Highlight the text you want to turn into a link, click the button, and when the popup appears, paste in the website address you want to link to.

(4) Image/movie insertion (the square tree icon): You can insert the following into your forum post: an image or movie from another website;  or an image from your computer. More details below if you need them.

(5) Spellcheck (the ABC icon): this underlines any suspect spelling. Click on an underlined word for suggestions

(6) Quote: Click this to insert any posts you have selected for insertion (more on this below)

*Unless you’re on a mobile device

How to add an image or movie to a forum post
You can add an image or movie from another website into your post; or an image from your computer. Click the square 'insert image/movie' tree icon, then choose one of the tabs from the popup:

 
From an external site (eg a photo sharing website). Put the web address (url) of the image into the form and submit it. You can also add a YouTube or Google video like this (movies do not appear until the post is submitted).
Your computer This works by uploading the image(s) to our site and showing it in your forum post in one fell swoop. Our site will automatically resize your image for you.


How to quote other people's messages
You can quote another member's post in your own message by clicking the quote button underneath it.
It works like this:

• Click the quote button under a post you want to quote (hover to make it visible)

Press this above your message box to paste it as a quote:

Here's how it looks:

 Phew!

Well done if you've got this far or if you've just got stuck in and started posting. Do ask us questions or experiment below. This hasn't covered everything, and we're still building new things, like star user badges.

Adding a picture doesn't work. Getting a server error every time I try.

<h1>Server Error in '/' Application.</h1> <hr size="1" width="100%" /> <h2>Compilation Error</h2>

basscl wrote (see)

Adding a picture doesn't work. Getting a server error every time I try.

Thanks basscl, I've logged that (it was working before, honest...)

 Photo uploading is working again (however it stretches the images in the message box; when you post the message they're fine again. We'll fix that too)

JessiePud wrote (see)

How do you edit a post?

Hi there. Right now you can only edit a post if it's the last one in the thread (hover over the post and you'll see a blue 'edit' button in the bottom corner). But we should be changing that soon so you can edit any of your posts.

(Some of our other sites prefer the 'last post' that way because they had problems with people editing old posts.)

I'll keep you updated about the fix

Sean, Babyexpert

 can't seem to upload a jpeg image. Are there only certain file types that can be used?

jpeg should be fine (and jpg, gif, png) - the only limit is currently a 1mb file size

you can resize images at www.shrinkpictures.com if it's not easy to do on your PC

let me know if that works?