How to Bulletin Board Code

Put simply, Bulletin Board Code (BBCode and BB Tags) lets you give expression to your words.  Most forums and galleries allow users to use BB Code.

Usually whenever you start a thread or write a reply to a post you will see a set of buttons above the message box. These buttons allow you to format and edit the text and any images in your post.  Those buttons represent BB Code.  Pressing one of those buttons will add its associated BB Code into a post.

You’re thinking, “If I can use the buttons, why do I need to read this?”  Easy, the code is short and simple.  If you know it, you don’t have to keep moving your hands from keyboard to mouse and you can show off to all your friends who will think you’re some kind of coding genius when you make your text and pictures dance about the screen.  Well, almost dance, the most dancing you’re likely to get your text to do is flash and move across the screen.

With BBCode you can,

• Add colour
• Add Pictures
• Video
• Make pictures, video and text clickable,
• Change text size
• Add sound
• Make words move across the screen
• Change text font
• Make words bold, italic, underlined
• Add hidden text
• Lets you speak to your audience by name
• And so much more

The gist is this: BBCode turns a forum into a simple word processor for its message posters.

This guide will show you some of the more useful Bulletin Board Code tags that you can use in most forums. Just remember that some forums require you to use lowercase letters for the tags (e.g [center]) whereas others require uppercase letters (e.g [CENTER]).

All BBC Tags take the form of an abbreviation, word, or some text, that is encased between one of these “[" and one these "]“  For example:

[colour=#BE0407]this text here[/colour]

That word, bit of text, is called a BB Tag (also, BBC Tag, BB Code and BBCode).

A ‘[b]‘forum post ‘[/b]‘with uninterpreted ‘[color=red]‘BBCode’[/color]‘ would look like this line

When adding a BB Tag into your post, your telling web browsers four things:

• When to start using the code
• What code to use (with a code word)
• When to stop using the code
• Which code to stop using

It isn’t as hard as it looks, I promise.

To tell a browser: “Hey, use some code for the next bit of text!” all you do is put the code tag between these “[" "]“.  The code tag for “make it bold” is the letter “b” so to make text bold we type “make this next bit bold this text here until I say stop…”

To tell a browser: “Stop using that code now.” repeat the code tag with one of these “[", these "/" and this "]“.  So to tell the browser to stop showing text in bold, you say “…You can stop using bold now, O.K.”

Just to get you started, here are some of the more basic and most used BB tags:

[b]…[/b] gives bold text

[i]…[/i] gives italic text

[u]…[/u] gives underlined text

[color=red]…[/color] gives red text

[color=blue]…[/color] gives blue text

[glow=gray,2,300][color=yellow]…[/color][/glow] gives yellow text with a gray background

[b][color=red]…[/color][/b] gives bold, red text

Those last two examples show the use of embeded BB Tags – the use of several tags to get a combined effect.

Go and post in the forum and try using some of the BB Tags.  You will get some entertainment out of it, I’m sure.

Here’s a reference table of more of those tags, remember that some bulletin boards use UPPER CASE whereas others use lower case tag words:

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