Posting Tips and Tricks

RCSCALEBUILDER.COM wants to make your experience here as pleasurable as possible so you can get the maximum benefit from the site.  We have put together this simple tips and tricks sheet to assist you getting started and giving you some shortcuts when posting in the forums.

1. Keep in mind RCSB is a moderated site and we are very proud of the fact that we will not tolerate foul language, disrespect, trolling, or other inappropriate behavior as indicated in the in the Site Rules.  They can be found here: http://www.rcscalebuilder.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1 Our moderators do a great job keeping this a family-friendly site so you can feel comfortable letting your children and grandchildren read the posts presented here. 

2. Make sure you are in the correct forum when starting a new thread.  We have a lot of specialized forums so it is important to get your thread in the correct one. This allows others to find your thread more easily when searching through forums for specific information.

3. Sometimes, when reading a post you want to reference what another modeler has written.  In the top right corner of their post is the word "quote".  By clicking this with your mouse, this will select the text written in their post and open a "Post Reply" box with the selected text already in the box.  Simply begin typing your reply below the inserted text and then click your mouse on the button on the bottom "Post Reply" when you are finished.  Congratulations, you did it!

4. To reply to a thread is even easier.  Simply navigate to the end of the thread until you see the [Post Reply] box.  Place your cursor in the box and type your reply.  When done, select the button on the bottom, "Post Reply" to add your post to the thread.

5. All modern browsers have "in-line" spell checking that automatically checks your work as you type (make sure it is not turned off in your browser settings).  One thing to remember regardless of your browser, the misspelled word is underlined in red or otherwise marked as misspelled.  By putting the cursor on the misspelled word and clicking the "right" mouse button, a list of word options will appear.  Simply select the correctly spelled word and it will change the misspelled word to the correct word.

6. If you are an Apple Safari user, they do not currently benefit from the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) post editor like Chrome or Firefox so you should take a look at one of those two browsers for the Mac. We hope to have a WYSIWYG editor that will fully support ALL browsers a future release of RCSB.

7. Posting links - Please do not just type in or paste the link (URL) in your post. The system ignores this treating it as just text and will break the link for spammer protection. If you want to make a link to a website's URL please use the "Add Hyperlink" button  on the editor toolbar. This will insert a workable link into your post.

8. Pictures really do speak a thousand words and yours show exciting details of scale models.  We have a 300kb file size limit on the size of our pictures.  This limit is in place because we use an "in-line" post format (not tiny thumbnails at the bottom of the post) to help you describe what you are trying to convey better. If we allowed any size image you would be sitting all day waiting for pages of giant images to load. For example. If each post has four (4) images and each page have 10 posts. That would be almost 5 megabytes to download every time the page is viewed. Imagine how long that would take to load in your browser if we didn't have a size limit!

9. There are many ways to automatically reduce the file size of your photographs for postings, the options are almost limitless.  If you are a Windows user you can download a free program for named Photorazor from http://www.stormdance.net/software/photorazor/software%20ove rview.htm and use this to automatically resize your images for posting. Your settings for Photo razor should be a max width of 1024 and quality set to 70%. Also, a good idea when posting pictures in your thread is to press the [Enter] key on your keyboard twice after each picture.  This will put two blank lines after each picture in the posting and make it just a little easier to view.

• Please limit the width of your images to no greater than 1024 pixels wide. This helps to maintain an easy to read format on all platforms and help the reader flow when reading a page of a thread.
• For Android phone and tablet users. You can just snap a picture and resize it using an app named "Reduce Photo Size" available on the Google Play app on your smartphone.  Launch Google Play and download "Reduce Photo Size" and run this on your photographs to resize them to the less than 250kb file size.  If you wish to review the details of this app you can read more about it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shoozhoo.i mageresizer.
• If you are an Apple iPhone or iPad user there are apps out there for you as well, here is one you can try, and it's called "simple resize".  You can download it from the Apple iTunes and you can read more about it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simple-resize/id327776379?mt =8.
• Of course, with any computer/device, you will need to learn the "ins and outs" of these processes specific to your device.  As much as we would like to help, RCSB cannot provide support for these programs and any issues pertaining to them.

If you have more questions about posting (or anything else related to RCSB) be sure to check out the Frequently Ask Questions (FAQ) on the site menu for answers to common questions: http://www.rcscalebuilder.com/faq.asp

Thanks for joining RCSB and we look forward to your first build thread.  Don't hesitate to jump right in and get going!

Thank you,
RCSB Staff