1. What is this about?

Hello everyone! I have created this guide to help people easily design their threads. This is especially important if you want to organize your ideas into a new thread and want to captivate people. You are free to copy and paste any part of this guide as a template or parts of it for your own threads. Use your own creativity and draw inspiration from each other!

Experiments!

I am working on some experiments a few replies down, take a look if you're interested! I will include the succesful ones in the guide when I'm done.

2. How to format your ideas into your posts

Your ideas are meaningful to you but they may not be well understood unless you take the time to properly format your threads. I will try my best to help you out.

3. Understanding Headers

There are 3 types of Headers and Paragraph text. What do they mean?

Header 1

Header 2

Header 3

Header 1 is the largest of them all. It’s intention is to be used once and for websites, they are intended to inform search engines the meaning behind the page. Header 1 is often too big to use and as such I recommend that you format your threads using either Header 2 or Header 3. Kindly note that when you use Headers you can color them but you cannot change their font-size. If you want a specific font size you will need to use Paragraph and set the font by hand. Later I will teach you how to use Web Developer Tools to adjust the font to a very specific number if you want to have that kind of control.

Paragraph is the setting you will use the most and it’s what you use to write your paragraphs. Remember; Headers for your paragraph’s title.

4. Using Tables to your advantage

Tables are very powerful and there are many ways you can use it to your advantage. First, let’s learn about how to use them.

To insert a table click on this icon: and then select the grid size.

Now you will get a table that looks like this:

By default you will see gray and blue borders. Does this mean you will see them when you publish your post? Yes. So if you want to change your border style, size, color, padding etc. You will need to right click inside your table and click on Table Properties.

If you want your border to be thinner, change the border size to a lower value and thicker requires a higher value. For no border select 0. To change the style of the border you can click on Advanced on the left panel and then you can select the style, border color and even background color!

Bonus Strategy: Using Invisible Tables to position elements in your thread.

Why would you want to do this? Well, sometimes you want to create a list but guess what? There’s no list system in these forums! A feature much needed but until that day comes, we will have to make due. To tab a list you will need to create a two column table and on the left column you can use it as your spacer. On the right column you can numerate your list.

Here’s an example:

Another reason why you may wan to use invisible tables is so you can organize images and text. For instance, you may wish to have a table with an image on the left and a list on the right or perhaps just some text. Here's an example...

Tips on Using Tables:

When you create a table, changes are that the items by default are aligned “middle” meaning you want your items to be aligned at the top more likely than not. Don’t start doing anything until you’ve decided on how you want your cells to align.

For the table’s header; middle align is most appropriate.

For the table rows; you will likely want to align the cells to the top.

Rows that you create afterwards will inherit the last properties of the row above it. To create new rows use the TAB Key on your keyboard on the last cell of the row and a new row will be created.

If you want to set the top-align property you will need to right click on a cell or select multiple cells and then right click -> Cell -> Cell Properties.

From here you will see various properties of the cell. To set the vertical alignment to TOP, look at the bottom of the modal (popup) under V Align and set it to Top.

Now your cells will be vertically aligned to the top as shown below:

If you want to customize the appearance of the cell, you can click on the Advanced tab and pick your border style, color and background color.

BONUS : Later I will demonstrate a few templates for you to copy and paste in your own thread!

5. Spicing things up with Images and the Official BDO Fan Kit

Did you know there’s an official BDO Fan Kit? You can download it and use it for your own BDO Fansite, BDO Twitch streams and so on! You can use them to spice up your forum posts too! But the Fan Kit is over 500MB! I will provide some fun images in this thread so you can make due without downloading the whole thing, but I encourage you to take a gander if you like.

You can copy and paste it (literally) into your own thread so keep this thread open in one tab and your new thread in another and go back and forth if you like. Or you can download these to your desktop and use them when you need to!

Various Official Black Desert Online Fankit Images

6. Copy and Pasting Templates

Ah, here comes the fun part! If you want to copy and paste some of the templates just copy and paste the elements you want below. Make sure click on KEEP FORMATTING when pasting.

Click here to see an example

 

First select the whole element and copy it (Ctrl+C)

Then Go to your form and paste it (Ctrl+P)

And select Keep Formatting

I. Simple Table Style A

II. Simple Table Style B

III. Simple Table Style C

IV. Simple Table Style D

V. Simple Table Style E

VI. Simple Table Style F

VII. Image and Text

VIII. Announcement Style

Black Desert Online! More Text!

IX. Combining F in an Announcement

Obtainable Item Location Item Reward A NPC In Velia NPC in Heidel NPC in Calpheon Item Reward B NPC in Port Epheria NPC in Olvia NPC in Kamasylvia

This is some more text Ellie’s [Event] Origin of Dark Hunger x10!   End of template

X. Useful Colors

XI. Table of Contents

XII. Convenient Dividers

7. Using Web Developer Tools to your advantage

Did you know your web browser has a tool that you can use to edit things on a website? It’s called the Web Developer Tool. Every browser has this and it’s intended for web developers to easily make changes on their website. For this purpose you can use it to alter things you normally can’t with Tiny Editor (The editor used here).

What can you do?

1. Enable Spell Checker
2. Create Lists
3. Change the font
4. Add Horizontal Rules and other basic HTML tags
5. Use Indents
6. Change some CSS rules within your post
   
   

What can’t you do?

1. You can’t insert certain HTML, all PHP or any Javascript
2. You can’t completely change the CSS
3. You can’t modify tables in a very specific manner, believe me, I tried!
4. You can’t force the editor to do things it natively cannot support.
5. You can't make tables behave correctly until they fix it
6. You can't use anchor tags, I tried many ways and couldn't get this to ever work

I also don’t recommend that you change the font. I occasionally change the font to 'StrongSword_New' because BDO’s website provides the custom support for it and you can too but beyond the default font and StrongSword_New, I would not pick any other font as not everyone has support for your chosen font.

In order to edit certain elements you will need to use the inspector tool and select the editor with it. Then you can pick the element you want to edit. This is an advanced feature and I don’t expect many people to ever take advantage of this but this is good if you need that extra finesse.

Web Developer Tools: Firefox - Use Inspector and find body id="tinymce"

8. Official looking headers / Tables!

What if you want your header to look like this:

And you want it inside a table? What then? Ah! Glad you asked.... I was able to replicate this after this guide was originally created. Here's how you do it... Open up web developer tools and find a <p></p> element in the editor. If there isn't, create one by entering a line break (pressing enter) somewhere in your text. Then, I want you right click on that element in the inspector tool and clic

Replace it with this:

<div class='opinion_wrap'>
<div class='subject_wrap'>

<div class='label_subject'>

<div class='label'>1.3 Donkey Buff</div>

<div class='box_reply'><p>Enter whatever you want in your div table.</p></div>

</div>

</div>

If done right it will look like this:

If you want to go beyond, you can edit the <p></p> tag content inside box_reply. Basically cut and paste using the inspector tool another element you created and this will be the easiest way to go about it. But be careful not to lose your progress! Always work with placeholder templates before you insert your actual content!

Notice: The design will appear correctly while viewing the thread but they will not appear while editing your thread.

9. Preventing your hard work from getting lost due to inactivity (New threads and Replies)

Don’t you hate it when you spend 30 minutes writing a really nice post and suddenly *poof!* There goes your hard work because you were logged out due to inactivity? Here’s the best tip you can have out of this entire thread: Open a new tab and go to BDO’s website and login. Once you’re logged in, you can submit your post again!

But what happens if there is a popup preventing you to click on the submit button? Can you get around this? Yes actually! After you logged in from another tab open up Web Developer Tools then click on the inspector button as shown in the previous tip.

Then select the intrusive popup requiring you to login and click on delete. That’s it! It’s gone. Well, hopefully if you clicked on the correct one that is. Be careful because there is no undo to this, if you select the wrong element and you delete your thread or reply, well… Bye-bye!

10. Tips on getting the editor to be cooperative

Sometimes the editor refuses to cooperate. Here are some tips to maybe help with getting it to do what you need it to do.

11. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

That’s it! That’s all I can possibly teach regarding this topic. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything but what's most important here is that I hope you were inspired at least just a little to perhaps improve your fure threads and correspondances! Be creative and have fun!

The forums keep getting better and I hope that this thread has been insightful to many of you. If you liked this thread please leave a like and say hi! Take care and happy threading!

My Other Featured Threads:

	[CONCEPT] Wardobe System With Renders! If you want to see my other thread about "New Wardrobe System" Click Here! I'd love to get your support!
	[GUIDE] Quality of Life: The Ultimate Guide This is a massive guide to improve your quality of life in the world of Black Desert Online! Featured in BDO Monthly!
	[CONCEPT] Improving The Pet Menu System + Redesign Concepts I think the pet system needs an overhaul don't you? This is a complete redesign of the pet system. While extravagant, it's the improvement to the features that really matter.