I and some of the other staff will be adding to this thread over time with tips and tricks to getting the most out of S2. To get things started, S2 is more than a message board. The core for posting is IP.Boards, but there's a considerable amount of other things here to develop community and to have fun with. For starters, there's a considerable amount of sports news, scores, schedules, standings, stats, and news columns that are here at your fingertips. On the left side of the pages are several drop-down boxes under "Select Sport:" that direct you to the sport you are interested in. You'll find all kinds of things that are suited to use in posts or your blogs or wiki pages. Speaking of which, everyone can have a blog! All you need to do is start your blog from your "My Controls" (see link at top of pages) page, and start blogging. You have all kinds of controls you can set up as to how your personal blog works. S2 encourages people to make and upload graphics to our Gallery (see blue buttons on the left, near the top). You don't have to upload your images to photobucket or some other image hosting site when you can use S2. It will also make pages load faster if people don't have to wait on some slower image hosting site to fetch images to be renedered. You can start your own image gallery "albums" from your "My Controls" page as well. You'll find the link in the "Menu" column (2nd from left). Sportsbook is a simulation/game we have integrated throughout the site. If we have odds from our automated newsfeed on a game, there'll be a way to "wager" on it in the appropriate place on the site. If you're viewing an NBA game preview, for example, there's a link to "Wager" on the page. You start with 1000 points each month and you wager those points to try to win more points, sportsbook rules. The winner at the end of the month is the one who has the most points. As you know, we paid $100 prizes to people who won our Pick Em contests, so you never know if we'll start doing something along those lines for the Sportsbook. It's up to you, if you make it popular enough that we're not giving prizes to the same few people all the time. Watch for the site announcments both in the Site News forum and in the announcement sections of each forum. We're constantly working on the site and adding new things. We're about to announce a new game for NBA fans; keep an eye out for it. Speaking of forums, when you're reading a team forum or viewing a thread in the team forum, there are links at the top under the team name and forum slogan. The "Team Page" for your favorite team has all the latest and past news for your favorite team. The "Team Stats" link will show you the up-to-date stats for your team. The "Salaries" link (NBA only, currently) shows you the team's payroll and individual salaries and contract status for the players. And so on. These are resources to help you research your posts! A tip about links and particularly those blue buttons on the left. But first, those blue buttons are context sensitive - if you're in the "NBA Basketball" section of the site, the buttons are for pages related to NBA Basketball. The tip: you can click anywhere on the button to activiate it and open the page in your browser; the text is a link, though, and you can right click on that and open the page in a new tab (or window) in your browser. Browse the way you want to! More tips: Subscribe to threads! You can automatically subscribe to threads from the email settings on your "My Controls" page - the link to email settings is there in the Menu column under "Options." Click the checkbox next to Enable 'Email Notification' by default? It says right below that: "Enabling this option will automatically subscribe you to any topic you start or reply to." Once subscribed, you can be notified by e-mail when someone posts in a thread you've posted in, or you can disable that function using the dropdown box choices. There's a link at the top of the home page to view your subscribed threads - a handy way to keep up on what you're posting about. Subscribe to forums! Go to your favorite forums and use the "Forum Options" dropdown menu and select the "Subscribe to this forum" menu item. You will be given options for email notifications (or none) for your forum subscription. Once subscribed, your favorite forums will be displayed on the home page below the recent activity. Now it's one click (from the home page) to get to your favorite forums.
FWIW I just downloaded Safari Beta 3.0 for XP and it's blindingly fast running S2. I think I may be switching to it permanently
I just grabbed Safari to try out. Omigosh! It's very fast. I just wish It had greasemonkey scripts. I will see if I can find any this weekend.
What is the advantage to subscribing to threads? I've done this before, and my email inbox just fills up really fast. What makes it better than just logging in and replying directly?
You can subscribe without email notifications. The User CP page is one of the coolest features of vB3 if you subscribe to forums and threads.
I never use the email feature with subscriptions. With a fully set up UserCP, one can look at the status of the forums and threads they care most about.
This is really very good site. It's very fast. I just wish It had greasemonkey scripts. I will see if I can find any this weekend.
this site is great for talking to people and talking about sports that you like and other things. i just wish it had greasemonkey scripts.
