Forum FAQ

Table of Contents

Signatures

Signatures are text that appears at the end of a post that serves as self-identification and/or promotion of self and/or affiliated parties. They can be entered automatically via the “Signature” field in your profile, or be cut & pasted directly into the message for more complex formats.

When creating your signature, please observe the following rules. Not following them can lead to limits placed on your ability to perform certain functions on the forums.

  • Only BB Code is allowed.
  • Signatures that are more than 6 lines high are not allowed. Blank lines are included in the count.
  • If HTML is enabled, you are allowed to use Stylesheets to further customize your signature, provided these stylesheets stays within the bounds of your message table cell, and does not impair other forum users’ ability to use the forums.

Account Problems

If you’re having problems logging into your account, please try remember the following:

  • Usernames and Passwords are Case Sensitive
  • Make sure your email address is up to date. In many cases it’s the only link to recovering your password in case of a problem.
  • You might be using a public proxy that modifies the look of our pages.

Forum FAQ

1. Do I have to register? Does it cost anything?
Registration is only required if you plan to actively participate in our forums. Registration is free, and you are not required to post your real name. You are required to register with a working email address, however.  In case you’re wondering, we do not give out our visitors’ email addresses to anyone.

2. What are Smilies? How do I put graphical smilies into my post?
You’ve probably seen others use smilies before in email messages or other bulletin board posts. Smilies are keyboard characters used to convey an emotion, such as a smile :) or a frown :(. This bulletin board automatically converts certain smilies / emotions to a graphical representation. For example, if you type :o in your BB post, it will automatically be converted to – a shameful face.

It is important to be careful with both humor and sarcasm, for either can be taken as criticism without face-to-face communications that could soften the tone.

The following smilies/emoticons are currently supported:

CodeImage
:)
:(
:D
;)
:o
:p
:{
*angry*
*barf*
*kiss*
*happy*
*mischief*
*rude*
*sad*
*surprised*
*wink*
*redfaced*
*yawn*
*heyhey*
*cop*
(N) or *tdown*
(Y) or *tup*
*flail*
*wall*
*nod*

3. What is BB Code? Can I use HTML instead?
You may be able to use HTML and/or BB Code in your posts, if your forum administrators and moderators have those options enabled for each forum. Some forums may have either HTML or BB Code turned off, or both turned off. Only the administrators can set this. Everytime you post a new note, you will be told whether BB Code and/or HTML is enabled for that particular forum. If HTML is on, you may use any HTML tags, but please be very careful that you use proper HTML syntax. If you do not, your moderator or administrator may have to edit your post. BB Code is similar to HTML, but offers just a few basic functions, such as hyperlinking, image display, and basic formatting (bold, italize, etc.). You can find the BB Code Reference here.

4. How come some of my HTML tags don’t work?
If after checking for HTML syntax you find that your HTML tags still don’t work, they might have been disabled by our forum software. Specific tags include: SCRIPT, APPLET, EMBED, IFRAME, and OBJECT. Also, most scripting events are disabled (onMouseOver, onMouseOut, etc.)

5. Who are Moderators?
Moderators control individual forums. They can edit, delete, or prune any posts in their forums. If you have a question about a particular forum, you should direct it to your forum moderator.

6. How do I change my profile?
You may easily change any info stored in your registration profile, using the “my account” link located near the top of each page. Simply identify yourself by typing your username and password and all of your profile information will appear on screen. You may change any items except your username.

7. How do I change my preferences?
As a registered bulletin board user, you may store your username and password in memory for up to one year at a time. This will prevent you from having to type your username and password every time ou post a note. You also have many different preferences that affect the way you view our forums. Just click on the “prefs” link and you can make either of these settings.

8. Do I need Cookies to use this forums?
This bulletin board uses cookies to store the following information: The last time you logged in, your username/password, and all the preference options. These cookies are stored on your browser. If your browser does not support cookies, or you have not enabled cookies on your browser, many of these time-saving features will not work properly.

9. How do I edit my posts?
You may edit your own posts at any time. Just go to the thread where the post to be edited is located and yo will see an edit icon on the line that begins “posted on…” Click on this icon and edit the post. No one else can edit your post, except for the forum moderator or the bulletin board administrator. A note is generated at the bottom of each post that is edited so that every one knows when a post has been edited.

10. Can I edit the subject of my own thread?
At present only forum administrators can edit subject lines.

11. What are Signatures?
You may use a signature (commonly used in email messages) on your posts. This is a new feature, so if you registered previously, you may not have been queried about storing a signature, but if you click on the profile link at the top of most bulletin board pages, you will be able to edit your profile, including your standard signature. Once you have a signature stored, you can choose to include it any post you make by checking the “include signature” box when you create your post. This bulletin board’s administrator may elect to turn the signature feature off at any time, however. If that is the case, the “include signature” option will not appear when you post a note, even if you have stored a signature. You may also change your signature at any time by changing your profile.

There is a limit on how large your signature can be. The limits are set by the forum administrators.

Note: You may not use HTML in your signature file, but you may use BB Code (except for the BB Code Image tage).

12. Can I Attach Files?
For security reasons, we do not allow file attachments. You may cut and paste text into your post, however, or use HTML and/or BB Code (if enabled) to provide hyperlinks to outside documents.

13. How do I Search for Specific Posts?
Currently you can only search through the subject and thread author fields. You cannot search through replies because it puts too much of a load on our servers.

14. How come some of the words in my posts were converted to “****”‘s?
The bulletin board administrators have the power to censor certain words that may be posted. This censoring is not an exact science, however, so certain words may be censored out of context. Please realize that the censoring, if any censoring is being performed, is being done by a computer based on the words that are being screened. Words that are censored are replaced with asterisks.

15. I’ve lost my username and/or Password. Can I do anything to recover them?
Retrieving your username and password is simple, assuming that email features are turned on for this bulletin board. All of the pages that require you to identify yourself with your username and password carry a “lost password” link that you can use to have your username and password emailed instantly to your email address of record. Please note that if you’re inactive for more than 60 days on this bulletin board your account will be deleted.

16. Can we have special interest forums?
It depends. We’ll consider them on a case-by-case basis, provided we have the technical & human resources to cover it.

17. How come some names are in different colors? Can I have my own color too?
The names in color are to identify HeavenGames Staff in the forums. Green = Cherub, Red = Angel, Orange = Seraph (Primary Site Contact), and Blue = Developers. Since the colors seek to identify staff and developers, it is currently not able to give users control over their own colors.

18. What’s Maintenance Mode?
Maintenance mode is when forum does house keeping – cleaning out its database and reindexing it.

19. How come I can’t post?
There can be several reasons. You may not post if:

  • The forum you post in is in maintenance mode;
  • The forum you post in is closed;
  • The thread you post in is closed;
  • The forum you post in is restricted. You need a proper password to post;
  • You are banned

If you believe you’re banned by mistake you should contact the forum’s moderator.

20. Is there Private messaging?
Private messaging is not supported at HeavenGames, although it is on our list of features to add. There are other things higher on our priority list and we would like to roll them out first. For alternatives, we suggest using e-mail, IM (MSN, AIM, Googletalk, etc.), or Facebook (or Myspace or the myriad thousand other social networks) to communicate.

21. Complaints, Suggestions, etc.
Complaints, suggestions, etc. in regards to the forums and/or forum moderators should be sent to forums at heavengames dot com. In most cases we will not handle complaints/suggestions/etc. posted on the forums because we cannot verify the authenticity of the post, nor do we have time to shift through 500+posts daily to pick out the posts that are addressed to us.

In addition, a reminder for people that wish to contest administrative actions (ban/delete/close/edits) with a good explanation should conduct them over private emails. Public posts against administrative actions will be deleted.

BBCode Reference

Bold

[B]text[/B]
Makes the text Bold.

Color

[C=color]text[/C]
Changes text color. Examples: [color=red]Red Text[/color] = Red Text, [color=#FFAA55]Colored Text[/color] = Colored Text

Code

[code]Source Code[/code]
Allows you to include source code in your post. The source code will not be processed by the forums: HTML, BBCode, and Smilies will all appear as is.)

Embedding Videos


We currently only support videos from youtube.com and vimeo.com. To include the video, browse to the video you want to embed, copy the URL from the browser’s address bar, and then insert that into your post, surrounded by the tag.

Hypertext Links

[URL]url[/URL]
[URL=url]text[/URL]

The URL code lets you create a link. For example to link to www.heavengames.com, you would use [url]https://www.heavengames.com[/url] and it would look like this: https://www.heavengames.com.

Another variant is to have text associated with the URL. For example, [url=https://www.heavengames.com]HeavenGames[/url] would look like this: HeavenGames

The URL Code does not permit other BB Codes in any of its fields.

Images

The IMG code is used for displaying images stored on other websites. Please note that IMG tags does not work in signatures or in forums that have the tag disabled. Please be courteous, and not have too many images, images too big, or images that are bigger than 50K in your posts. If you want to use your own images, use a free webhost such as Geocities to store your images.

Italic

[I]text[/I]
Italicizes the text.

Quote

[Q]text[/QE]
[Q=user]text[/Q]

Quotes the text, i.e.:

quote:


This is a quote.


If you use the [quote=user] syntax, it’ll say “Quoted from user:” instead of “quote:”

Underline

[U]text[/U]
Underlines the text.

Whisper

[W]text[/W]
Whispers text (i.e. I’m whispering)

Indent

[ind]text[/ind]
Indents the text, i.e.:

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” – Bill Gates, 1981.

Lists

[ul]
[*] Dog
[*] Cat
[/ul]

Adds a bullet in the beginning of the line and sorts the lines into a bulleted list, i.e.:

  • Dog
  • Cat

[ol]
[*] Dog
[*] Cat
[/ol]

Adds a number in the beginning of the line and sorts the lines into a numbered list, i.e.:

  1. Dog
  2. Cat

Superscript

[SUP]text[/SUP]
Superscript (i.e. MicrosoftTM)

Subscript

[SUB]text[/SUB]
Subscript (i.e. H20)

Strikeout

[S]text[/S]
Strike-out (i.e. Microsoft)