1. #14

On the old system, you could send an author a private message directly from one of their posts, and the system would include a link in the private message. I have not found such a feature here, but there is a fairly-straightforward way to accomplish the same thing.

Send them a quote of their post by private message.

In other words, click the [Reply With Quote] button and copy the quotation from the composition box, including both [QUOTE] tags. (After clicking in the composition box, keyboard shortcuts CTRL+A highlights everything and CTRL+C copies it, for most users.)

Now, click on the post's link in the "breadcrumb trail" near the top of the page, to return to the thread without posting. From there, you click the author's username and select the option to send them a private message.

When you get to the composition box of your private message, paste the quotation that you copied (CTRL+V).

The [QUOTE=username;123456] tag contains a pointer to the original post; when the author gets your message, there will be a clickable icon [>>] in the quotation that they can use to go to their post.

In fact, this clickable icon appears within quotes in posts, too, as long as the pointer was copied. In other words, if you're reading a thread and seeing a partial quote from someone, you can use that icon to jump to the specific post in the thread from which the partial quote comes. Very handy.

2. #15

The new system does not provide [spoiler] tags by default. But, until such a feature is available here, there is a workaround that I learned from Soroban before we had spoiler tags on the old system.

Use white text and instruct to highlight. Like this:

Spoiler: Highlight the area between the lines.

Now it is spoiled.

NOTE: Functional spoiler tags were subsequently activated, but at some point they broke or went away.

(June 2012)

3. #16

Right-click a LaTex expression, and a menu now appears that lets you do a bunch of stuff via MathJax.

I found that adjusting the 'Scale All Math' setting to 165% helps with those tiny LaTex expressions on my screen.

4. #17

On any board's message-index page, each thread's "Replies:" value is a clickable link which pops-up a contributor list for the thread.

I use this feature to quickly check a thread when I'm curious to know (without opening it) whether the conversation is strictly between two people or, say, a specific group of people.

Also, you may have noticed that hovering the mouse pointer near the Replies/Views data (for threads which contain a post by you) generates a pop-up descriptor listing the number of posts that you have contributed to the thread. This duplicates the same feature at the thread's icon (which has a green arrow appended, whenever the thread contains a post by you).

5. #18

Referring to #16 (above), I've since discovered that I lose the math-scaling setting whenever I clear my browser cache, which I do often.

Here's another approach to increase the size of small LaTex, an approach that's handled by the author of the post: Increase the point size of the code itself!

In other words, if the rendered code looks too small when previewing your post, then go back, highlight the actual tex code, and up the size from the default of 2 to size 3.

This is a line of LaTex where the code is the same size as all of the typing above (default size 2):

$\frac{d}{dx}\frac{1}{x^{2}} = \frac{d}{dx}x^{-2} = -2\cdot x^{-3} = \frac{-2}{x^{3}}$

This is the same line of code, but reformatted from size 2 to 3:

$\frac{d}{dx}\frac{1}{x^{2}} = \frac{d}{dx}x^{-2} = -2\cdot x^{-3} = \frac{-2}{x^{3}}$

Here's another tip for increasing the size when you're typing ratios (which is where small-rendered code often arises):

Here's the top line above, replacing \frac with \dfrac:

$\dfrac{d}{dx}\dfrac{1}{x^{2}} = \dfrac{d}{dx}x^{-2} = -2\cdot x^{-3} = \dfrac{-2}{x^{3}}$

Other text formatting changes affect LaTex, too. Like changing the color of the code itself:

$\dfrac{d}{dx}\dfrac{1}{x^{2}} = \dfrac{d}{dx}x^{-2} = -2\cdot x^{-3} = \dfrac{-2}{x^{3}}$

Be careful, if you try to color your LaTex. Since the wysiwyg composition field hides the actual formatting tags, it's easy to get hidden tags embedded within a line of LaTex code, causing a rendering failure. If that happens, you'll need to highlight all of the code (and maybe the carriage returns before and after, as well) and change the color back to Auto.

Individually-colored \text{} coding, at size 5.

$\text{H}$$\text{a}$$\text{v}$$\text{e}$$\text{ }$$\text{f}$$\text{u}$$\text{n}$$\text{!}$

6. #19

Somebody PM'd to ask why vBulletin's WYSIWYG is broken. They had pasted text which displayed with formatting from the source (eg: colors, sizes, boldface), and vBulletin's formatting controls would not allow them to remove the boldface, change the colors to black, and fix the size.

Well, the WYSIWYG interface in vBulletin is very problematic, to be sure, but the particular issue addressed in that PM is actually a feature, not a bug.

You see, when one copies text from the Internet (or, perhaps, a document), there can be unseen formatting codes that get copied along with the actual text. You may be familiar with this type of coding -- such text is often referred to as "rich text".

Using the paste command (or keyboard shortcut CTRL+V) often pastes such "rich text" in a way that allows the formatting commands to stick "permanently".

When you desire to paste copied text as plain text (i.e., you want to strip out all of the "rich text" formatting), then do one of the following.

Use CTRL+SHIFT+V

or

In fact, I sometimes use this feature to deal with vBulletin's WYSIWYG flusterclucks. In other words, when my own typing/formatting becomes convoluted secondary to vBulletin bugs, it is sometimes easiest to simply CTRL+A the entire composition, followed immediately by CTRL+X and CTRL+SHIFT+V. This sequence of steps will strip away all text formatting.

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