Using the Wandering Elks Forum

[John Hayden]

Using the Wandering Elks Forum

It was suggested that we should create a new section of the website where traveling Elks could upload & share pictures of interesting things that they see, or do... along the way. Ask and you shall receive.  Maybe. Depends on the request, really. And probably my mood at the time.   

But in this instance, here it is.  So whether you are still on the road or just got back, if you have some interesting photos  or videos you'd like to share, we all would love to see them.





How It Works

We have created this Wandering Elks forum and a corresponding  Wandering Elks Album in our Gallery. The first thing for you to do is to upload your picture(s) to the Wandering Elks album in the Gallery.

To upload a photo to our Gallery, just go to the album you want to add a photo to. If you are logged onto the site, you will see an "Add an Item to this Album" button. Just click on that and follow the directions to upload your photo.

You can add a description to your photo if you want to. That description can be short or as long as you want it to be... complete with most of the text formatting options available here in the forum messages.


Then, if you want to expand on that & make it even easier for others to see your pictures and make comments, etc... come here to the Wandering Elks forum, post a new topic about your trip or pictures... and put links to the pics in the message so they will display here as well.

 

Displaying Photos From The Gallery In Your Forum Messages

For each photo in the Gallery, there is a Details Page which looks remarkably like this:

Here on the details page, you can Rate the photo, make Comments on it and Download it. It also displays various links to the photo that you can copy and paste that will display the photo elsewhere, such as in blogs or on other websites.

To display the photo in one of our forum messages here, you would copy the BBC embed code and paste it into your message. And that's all there is to it. Yes... its really that simple.

* The photo will not display as you are typing your message. But if you Preview the message or when you Post it, the photo will be displayed.



Now... there are two ways to display a photo's Details page. If you are looking at one of the Albums where a full page of photos are shown, just click on the title of the photo as shown below.

If you have clicked on the photo or are viewing the photos in Slide Show Mode, you can click on the Details link that appears in the lower-right corner of each displayed photo.

Displaying Photos From Other Sources In Your Forum Messages

You can also display photos that you have hosted at other sites, such as Photo Bucket or Image Shack. Most on-line photo hosting sites provide several types of links to display the images... just as our Gallery does. On these sites, you would want to use the link they provide for use on Forums... which would be a link surrounded by [IMG] [/IMG] tags. Like this:

[IMG]http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b242/_Your%Album/your_image.jpg[/IMG]

If the image is hosted somewhere where no links are provided, you can just copy the direct link of the image (right click on it and select Copy Image Location or Copy Image URL). Then paste that URL into your message, highlight the entire link, then click on the Image button    to enclose it in IMG tags.


Displaying Videos In Your Forum Messages

You can also display videos in your forum messages. The forums have been customized to automatically convert a link to a video into the video viewer used by the site that is hosting it. This works on most of the popular video hosting sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo.

So, to include your video in a message, just copy the link to the video and paste it in your message text. That's it. When you Preview or Post/(save) your message, the video will be displayed but will not start running until the person reading the message clicks on it.