I frequently read message boards on the web, and see people posting pictures and links. How can I do that?
Many of the most popular message board systems support a style of markup called BBCode. You can usually use BBCode to spice up your posts with images, links, and formatted text. BBCode is pretty simple to understand, and takes only a few moments to memorize.
BBCode Syntax
BBCode allows you to markup a block of text in a similar fashion to HTML. BBCode tags are a word or single character enclosed in square brackets.
Formatted Text
BBCode uses b, i, and u to describe bold, italicized, and underlined text:
[b]Hello, World![/b] becomes Hello, World!
[i]Hello, World![/i] becomes Hello, World!
[u]Hello, World[/u] becomes Hello, World!
Links
To link a URL to the resource it identifies, paste the URL and enclose it in the [url] BBCode tag:
[url]http://www.example.com/[/url] becomes http://www.example.com
To link text to a URL, you must use a slightly similar version of the same tag:
[url=http://www.example.com/]Hello, World![/url] becomes Hello, World!
Images
Many message board systems have an image upload feature. You can often use this to upload an image. Otherwise, use the [img] BBCode tag.
To use the [img] tag, you must first upload your image to an external location. ImageShack will allow you to upload an image, and will return the URL of that image upon completion. Once you have the url, simply paste it into your post and surround it with the [img] [/img] tags like so: [img]http://www.example.com/image.jpg[/img].
