Alright, I think someone needed to do this. As somoene who tends to pick up on new things fairly quickly, I thought I could help some people out.

Basic Guidelines to Navigation

• The first and most obvious thing you'll notice is the fact that this forum utilizes a news page as the homepage and the actual forum is only contained within it. Get used to clicking 'Home' for the homepage and 'Community' for the forums. If you like to have a bookmark for this site, then you may want to set it to go directly to the forums instead of the actual homepage.
• Once you are in the forums, you'll see a layout that is for the most part quite similar to that of the old forum. The main navigation bar at the top is set out quite differently to that of the old forum but it still contains mostly the same features, just under different headings. Your notifications/alerts and profile-related stuff will be on the top-right like always. The chatbox, the list of online users and the forum statistics will be on the right hand side, however (as opposed to top (chatbox) and bottom (online users + forum stats) on the old forum).
• Your 'Alerts' covers a great variety of things, ranging from replies to a post you made, to 'trophies' attained, to incoming visitor messages. If there is a number on it, that refers to how many new alerts you have. Click on it to view them.
• Each button in the top navigation bar comes with a drop-down list. Use it to get to places faster. For example, if you want to go straight to the 'current visitors' page in the 'Members' section, just hover your cursor over the arrow next to 'Members'.
• 'What's New' functions the same as 'New Posts' from the previous forum. Find it under the 'Forums' heading.
• You may also notice that the What's New page completely filters out any content that you've already read. If you want to see all the recent messages, but have the read ones marked as read and the unread ones marked as unread, then click 'All recent messages' in the top right.
• 'Quick Navigation' comes in extremely handy. If you don't know what that is, see this image below.

You'll always see that bar near the top of the page no matter where you are on the forum. See the button that the circle and arrow is pointing to? Click on it and it will open your Quick Navigation panel.

• See where it says '[insert username here]' in the top right corner next to 'Alerts'? Hover your cursor over that and you'll be treated to a lovely little drop-down list that serves an excellent 'quick settings' panel. You can also use it to view the ratings you've given and received as well as your watched threads.
• Alternatively, if you actually click on [insert username here] you'll be given a fully-fledged control panel similar to the User CP on the old forum.
• When you're accessing a forum section or the What's New page, you may see a little blue circle to the left of thread titles. Clicking on it will take you to the first unread message in thread as opposed to taking you to the OP. This is similar to the little grey icon next to thread titles that you may have come familiar with on the old forum.
• The shoutbox can be accessed on the right-hand side of the forum homepage, but it also has its own little section in the navbar which can be used for accessing the 'full' shoutbox. You also have the option of opening a pop-up window to view the shoutbox.
• Another cool feature is the ability to view and use the shoutbox whilst viewing a thread.

Posting Guidelines

• Alright, posting and replying to threads. The most important thing about the forum . First and foremost, you shouldn't be worried - it works very similarly to how it did on the old forum.
• First thing you'll notice about your postbox that's different to the one you had on the old forum is that BBCode is automatically converted into its proper visual format in the postbox. For instance, if you bolded a word in your post, it doesn't say "[b]text[/b]". It'll just convert into actual bold text, like a Word document would do.
• If you want to change the above to make it work like it did on the old forum, don't fret! Click on the far right of the postbox and it'll now show BBCode tags. The problem with this, however, is that it stops showing the buttons for quick input of tags. So you have to type all your BBCode stuff manually if you want to use this format. For this reason, it's highly recommended that you stick with the default format.
• If you want to quote someone, the 'Reply' button does it for you.
• To quote multiple people just click the reply button on all the posts you wish to quote. They will all transfer into your reply box at the bottom. They will be bunched up though so make sure to space them out a bit so they're easy to read.
• If you want to post an image, you don't actually have to copy the image URL and wrap it in the tags. All you have to do is copy and paste the image itself. How cool is that?!
• To embed a YouTube video, hit the 'Media' button (third from the right) and enter the URL.
• A big new feature is 'tags' or 'mentions'. By typing '@' and then begnning to type a certain user's name, a little drop-down list will come up to show all the users that you may be wanting to tag/mention. Click on the user desired and they will get an alert to tell them that someone has tagged them in a post. Basically an alternative method of quoting someone. << This does not work anymore >>
  
  That's about all I have for now. I'll update this in accordance to later findings. If you have anything to add, feel free to post it below and I'll edit it into this post.
  
  Hope I helped.

 

You're welcome, TheUser.

 

^ How did I not figure that? Hahaha

 

Useful, eh? Debatable. I'd say it's more 'informative' than 'useful'.

 

Yeah... to be honest I think the oly really useful ones that most people wouldn't know about by now would be the quick navigation thing, the 'view all recent threads' thing and some of the posting stuff.

But then again, maybe we're just quick learners haha.

 

Updated with the new 'tagging' feature that Harley seems to have just implemented. Bottom of the posting guidelines.

EDIT: Okay, wait a minute... it was working before, now it's saying I don't have permission... this shite is weird.