Forum Handbook

[Fletch_smf]

This is a guide to explain how the forum is set up, where you can find things, and how to do things in the forum like posting pictures. The FAQ if you prefer.

What are the sections of this forum about?
- We've split the forum into 6 categories

• Dragon Park - Where all talk related to playing the game takes place. It holds the latest news, brags from the players, tips and advice on breeding the rare/limited dragons and achieving other goals, and any and all DragonVale talk.
  
• Elemental Boost - Where we help you get the most out of your game.
  
• DraggINN - Which holds all Off Topic talk, general chat, the introduction thread and talk about everthing NOT DragonVale.
  
• Thatch-Roofed Cottage - Which shows off all the amazing creative work by forum members.
• Dragon Colosseum - Which holds all the many competitions that are currently running including the latest Speed Breeding and Post of the Month competitions.
  
• Hatchery - All Things Forum/Site Related
  
• Dragon Library - Which holds all the old competitions, any threads which have past their use by date and the DragonVale Handbook. The Library is read only.

What threads should I read to find out the latest DragonVale news?
- There's a few threads that have the latest information to hand:

• Dragonvale Tips, Strategies, Updates & Help - Holds the general chatter about DragonVale. The OP (Original Post) has a Table of Contents that will link you to important moments in the history of the game.
  
• Dragonvale Rare Breeding Guide: No Guarantees! - Exactly as it sounds. People post info there. The OP holds successful breeding combinations for the rare/limited dragons
  
• The Dragon's Tale holds all the issues sent to members since the beginning of the forum. This holds the important information (at time of publication) in a condensed form.

There's 1000's of replies in some of these threads! Where should I start?
- The informational threads will have a Table of Contents in the first post when they become too large OR the important information is summarised in the OP (Original Post ... first post in the thread).

Why can't I start a new thread?
- It was decided to keep the threads to a minimum so things could be easily found. Originally new threads were simply merged into the appropriate thread, but that made it hard for the author to find it when looking for replies. This way they are forced to post in the correct place (mostly) and therefore know where to go to look for responses.

Where should I post my questions to get help?
- Well what sort of help are you looking for?

• Getting Started with the Game
  
• Breeding Rare/Limited Dragons
  
• Achieving Gold Shrines
  
• Optimising your Game Play
  
• General Game Help
  
• Breeding Dragons and Breeding Rules
  
• What to Breed for and When
  
• The Dragons' Breeding Times
  
• The Co-op Breeding Cave or looking for Breeding Friends
  
• Apple Gem Friends or Android and Kindle Gem Friends

There's an App for the forum? What can you tell me about it?
- All the information about the App can be found HERE

Some of these competitions require me to post a picture. How do I do that?
- Information on posting a picture can be found HERE

What's with the Eggs and "Plant", "Earth", "Lightning", etc under peoples names?
- They are member rankings based on post count. You get more eggs and move up to the Expensive Dragon types as you participate in the forum.

How do I personalise my account?
- You can find all the information on personalising your account HERE

What's with all these "Fabulously Gay Idea"s?
- This is a forum staple being held over from our last forum home. The conversation went like this.

Altraeis - What a fabulously gay idea. Shall do the same from now on.
Altraeis - That was meant to say 'fabulously great idea', dang auto correct. lol
tonygtech - LMAO!!!
Segbert - Lmao
Fletch_smf - I prefer "fabulously gay idea" myself and am going to start using that in everyday conversation.

And my power as a mod at this new forum meant many people started using it too.

Koala? I don't get it!
To understand the evolution of our wishing luck to each other you need to read starting with this post.

What's with the total lack of z's in this post?
- I'm Australian. Deal with it.

[Fletch_smf]

The ProBoards App
Proboards has an Application for you to use the forum directly rather than through a browser.



And they have a great series of video tutorials at Youtube on how to use it.

www.youtube.com/ProBoardsApp

It costs a couple of dollars but is money well spent. You can find out more at www.proboards.com/mobile

Tips for App problems

Jan 11, 2013 2:31:34 GMT -6 rynoster said:

How does one have the iPad ProBoards app remember your login details?

Jan 11, 2013 11:52:48 GMT -6 rynoster said:

Jan 11, 2013 11:03:20 GMT -6 Pixie said:

The following helped when a couple of our members were having this problem a couple months ago.

Go to your forums tab. There might be 2 DV Community options there. One mine, The Dragonvale Community option makes me loggin everytime. There is a second one that has my username @ The Dragonvale Community, that one keeps me logged in.

Thanks Pixie, that helped a bit.

What I had to do was add another forum by entering the URL manually, after logging in it automatically created the username@DV Community option.

So it would turn out that adding a forum by searching for it in ProBoards does not do that.

---

Oct 20, 2012 20:45:44 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

The ProBoards App wasn't connecting for me so I uninstalled and reinstalled. Now it asks me to Login every time. Am I missing the stay logged in bit in settings or something?

Oct 20, 2012 22:08:31 GMT -6 tonygtech said:

Oct 20, 2012 20:53:08 GMT -6 Pixie said:

Tony was having the same issue earlier. Didn't see if he got it fixed, or what he did about it.

You saw the tick box above your loggin username to keep you logged in, right?

on the web version I get the option to stay logged in but not on the app. I have to log in every time. IT stinks!
GCID troutfisher10

Oct 20, 2012 20:58:32 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

Oct 20, 2012 20:53:08 GMT -6 Pixie said:

Tony was having the same issue earlier. Didn't see if he got it fixed, or what he did about it.

You saw the tick box above your loggin username to keep you logged in, right?

No. Can't see anything like that.

Oct 20, 2012 21:22:38 GMT -6 Pixie said:

Oct 20, 2012 21:19:03 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

And then this.

Support suggests the following; can you do this on your phone?

One thing you can try is visit the "Settings" app on your iPad, and once there, press on "Safari", and then on the next screen toggle the switch for "Private Browsing" to "On". In the message that comes up, select the "Close All" option. Once this is done, visit Safari and you should see that the browser window is now black, rather than the traditional blue color. With this mode enabled, visit the forum again and see if this helps with your login

Oct 20, 2012 22:21:00 GMT -6 Pixie said:

Oct 20, 2012 22:08:31 GMT -6 tonygtech said:

on the web version I get the option to stay logged in but not on the app. I have to log in every time. IT stinks!


GCID troutfisher10

Have you tried to clear the cache in the app?
Settings>Reset>Clear Cache

Then loggin again. Let me know if that works.

One last thought, then I'm out of suggestions.

Go to your forums tab. There might be 2 DV Community options there. One mine, The Dragonvale Community option makes me loggin everytime. There is a second one that has my username @ The Dragonvale Community, that one keeps me logged in.

Oct 20, 2012 23:27:46 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

Oct 20, 2012 22:21:00 GMT -6 Pixie said:

Go to your forums tab. There might be 2 DV Community options there. One mine, The Dragonvale Community option makes me loggin everytime. There is a second one that has my username @ The Dragonvale Community, that one keeps me logged in.

That's it! Yeah it used to have fletch@... Will see how I can go about creating that again.

Oct 21, 2012 1:26:12 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

Oct 20, 2012 23:47:37 GMT -6 tonygtech said:

if you figure it out let me know


GCID troutfisher10

PixieWA is a SuperStar!!!!!!!!!!!!

I mean, you all knew that, but it bears repeating.

Tony, goto forums. Click on the + sign to add a forum type in [yourusername]dragonvale=tips.proboards.com and click on one of the http links. It will ask you to login but hopefully that will be the last time you do it.

After you know know it's working you can click on Edit in the Forums tab, and a red minus sign comes up against all the forums you've visited. You will be save to delete all but the tony@ forum.

Let me know if that works for you.

Oct 21, 2012 21:31:58 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

Oct 21, 2012 18:40:04 GMT -6 tonygtech said:

I still can't figure out that log in fletch.... When I try to enter something else my keyboard disappears and reappears with each key stroke then when I click on a link I get an error message :/


GCID troutfisher10

Try.

[e-mail]

Oct 22, 2012 0:31:21 GMT -6 tonygtech said:

Oct 21, 2012 21:31:58 GMT -6 Fletch_smf said:

Try.

[e-mail]

k think i got it! Thnx fletch


Yup it worked! Woohoo

[Fletch_smf]

Posting a picture in the forum

Using the free site imgur
This will be using imgur. Make an account and log in. Find and press this upload button:

in the top right hand side.

Next you should be presented with this screen:


Be mindful, I am on my iOS iPad, so a computer or android version will probably look slightly different. Now choose the photos you want, in my case, simply by clicking on them. I have a choice from my gallery, but on the computer this will be your computer documents.


Click ok, and the pictures should be presented in a list, ready to upload, as so:


Click "start upload".
The upload will take about 5 seconds per picture on a fast iPad or computer. Once it is complete return to "your gallery" of pictures by pressing the back button in the top left corner of the screen.

If you refresh, the uploaded pictures will appear in your gallery. Choose the one you want to upload and you will be presented with something like this, although a different picture, obviously:


Here's the problem; you don't want the link. You want the "Bb code" because that is what can be integrated into forums. You want this because then anyone in the forum can see. Your picture without having to change browser at all, or even follow a link. For you techno geeks out there, it works similar to how "smileys" work, by implementing coded formats for a different visual representation.
To get the Bb code, click on the arrow next to the word "link" (a direct link to the photo) and you should get a drop down menu. Select the option saying "bb code", like so:





Your code will start with img in square brackets, "[" and "]". And end in /img in the same brackets.

Copy this code and then paste it into the forum and ta-da there is your photo.

This may seem complicated, but it's great because I can screenshot something, get on imgur and upload it within a few clicks.

Proof that this works can be found in the pictures I provided in this guide as visual aid.

Hope this works for you

From the app

• - reply
  
• - open advanced options
  
• - photo album
  
• - choose my picture
  
• - upload to ..... This forum
  
• - choose - smaller
  
• - close advanced options
  
• - type in text
  
• - send

[Fletch_smf]

Personalising My Account
You make most (if not all?) of the changes to your account in your Profile. You can only do this in a web browser, not in the App, and most of this info can only be seen in a browser as well. You access this by clicking on the link in the top menu bar.



This shows the information about your account, and gives you the chance to Modify your Profile.



Account Information
This first section allows you to change your password, email address and the name that is displayed in the forum.

Personal Information
Here you can change your gender (or more accurately the gender that is displayed in your profile) and whether it is displayed or not. You can give yourself a location and link to a website (it is important that you start the link with http://)

You can also add the 3 most used parts of your profile, your Avatar, your Personal Text and your Signature. The Personal Text is obvious, and the signature is relatively straight forward, but the Avatar will take a little more explaining.

Changing your Avatar
First up there's a bunch of standard avatars which are the dragon babies. Just pick one from the drop down box and you're good to go.

If you want to personalise it you can upload a picture to a hosting site like photobucket and add the link to the box Avatar URL: Specifying the height and width of your Avatar is generally a good idea, and it can't be bigger than 100 pixels high or wide.

Instant Messengers
You can add your names for the Messengers here so people can contact you through them.

Account Preferences
Here you decide what you show us and what you want to see of others. Signatures, Avatars, etc.

One of the important ones is Mass Emails. If you want to be notified by us via email when a new Dragon is released, it is important it says Opt-In

Dates and Times
Allows you to set your time zone and the time and date format of the forum.

You are also able to change a range of other factors just under tour avatar:

Platform
This is the platfrom you are on: iOS (apple products) or android (kindle, samsung, HTC and other).

Currently Sharing
The dragon which you are sharing/blue hearting in the cooperative breeding cave.

Accepting New Gifts
Are you able to accept and reciprocate gems?

Forum Name to Tag
On this forum you have two names - your display name (i.e mine is Fletch_Smf) and the name which someone can tag you with (mine is Fletch). Like me, yours could be different, thus to make it easier for people to tag you, you can write the original name you signed up with here. To find yours, click on members in the top panel and search for your own name that is currently displayed. The currently displayed name will be in the second column, and your FORUM NAME TO TAG is in the first column.