:TITLE:Discussion board :INC:index :SUB:Introduction

VNDB has a nicely integrated discussion board which can be used for, well, discussions. As we're not using any popular or freely available forum software and have instead written something by ourselves, this discussion board has a few slight differences with the popular boards you're used to.

:SUB:Boards

To make sure interested people can find your post, all threads have relations to one or more 'boards' that define what the discussion is about. This is similar to boards on other forums, but here every item in the DB has its own board, and it's possible to link a thread to more than one board. The following boards can be used:

db
VNDB Discussions. This is a general board for threads not about any specific entry in the database.
v#
For discussions about a particular visual novel. The board v17, for example, is used for all threads related to v17.
p#
Same as v#, but for producers.
u#
The u# board can be used to notify a user on this site about something he/she must see or to discuss about an edit he/she has made. This is similar to the 'private message' feature of most sites, except it's not 'private'...
an
Used for site announcements. Limited to moderators.
:SUB:Formatting

The following codes can be used to format your message:

X# or X#.#
A 'VNDBID', as we call them. These are numbers starting with a character (d, p, r, u or v), and are optionally followed by a period and a second number. VNDBIDs will automatically be converted into links to the page on the website. For example, typing 'v4.4' will result in 'v4.4'.
URL
Any URL (without the use of the [url]-tag, see below) will be converted into a link, similar to the VNDBIDs. Example: 'http://vndb.org/' will be formatted as 'link'.
[url]
The classic BBCode [url]-tag. Can only be used in the form of [url=link]link title[/url].
E.g. '[url=/v]List of visual novels[/url] and [url=http://blicky.net/]some external website[/url]' will be displayed as 'List of visual novels and some external website'
[spoiler]
The [spoiler]-tag should be used to hide information that could spoil the enjoyment of playing the visual novel for people who haven't done so yet.
[quote]
When quoting other people, put the quoted message inside a [quote] .. [/quote] block. Please note that the popular [quote=source]-syntax doesn't work on VNDB. (yet)
[raw]
Show off your formatting code skills by putting anything you don't want to have formatted in a [raw] tag. Any of the formatting codes mentioned above are ignored within a [raw] .. [/raw] block.
[code]
Similar to [raw], except that the text within the [code] .. [/code] block is formatted in a fixed width font and surrounded by a nice box to keep it separate from the rest of your post.

There is no [img]-tag and there won't likely ever be one, if you want to include screenshots or other images, please upload them to an external hosting service (e.g. TinyPic) and link to them in your post.