Abaco Forum Userguide and Policies

[DrRalph]

Welcome to the Abaco Forum. The Forum opened on August 2, 2006; it was conceived and is operated by five people who had previously administered the original Abaco Message Board. This site has three principle functions:

• The Abaco Forum is an advocate for tourists and second homeowners. All of us who own and operate the Forum are US citizens; we live in the US and visit Abaco. Our goal is to enlighten new and returning visitors about vacation as well as retirement opportunities in Abaco.
• We are also an advocate for tourist-oriented businesses in Abaco. One of our primary goals is to match the tourist with the right venue, whether it's a resort, cottage, airline, boat rental, restaurant, whatever. We greatly respect and salute the owners and employees of Abaco's hospitality-oriented businesses. You people make it all worthwhile!
• Lastly, we offer you, tourist or Abaconian, a forum whereby you can offer your feelings and opinions regarding topics as they relate to Abaco. We allow much greater leeway then the Abaco Message Board when it comes to allowing your free expression, but we ask that you respect the people you disagree with.

We encourage you to register: it's easy, free, and there are no obligations or spam. Just click on Register in the black menu bar, and follow the instructions. (This site is not related to the old Abaco Message Board, so even though you have registered there, you have to register here as well.) And please make sure you bookmark our Home Page; this is where you will want to start each session on the Forum. Once you've registered, we encourage you to introduce yourself to the membership by making a post on the New Member Forum. We are a very friendly group, and we would love to meet you.

Forum participants are asked to be polite, civil, and respectful of others. Please make sure your posts are "more or less" relevant to Abaco. Here are a few key issues that we ask you to avoid:

• Commercial posts; sorry, but you have to pay for advertising,
• Religion: you know why,
• US partisan political issues; you may indeed criticize other US government policy. We want to avoid liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican, and the War in Iraq. You can do that at a jillion other sites, don't do it here,
• Rumors: please be sure you know what you are talking about,
• Please do not attack another Forum member or use obscene or overtly harsh language or content,
• Use discretion and class when you post what you know will be a controversial position.

The discussion forums are "post-moderated," that is, your message appears as soon as you post it. Moderators watch the board all day long, and can delete something they feel is inappropriate. We ask that you send us an email or personal message if you have a question about something you are about to post, or if we delete something you wrote and you are unhappy about it, as opposed to posting your commentary on the forum. We want to give you the leeway you like, but there is a line we don't want to cross.


In 2007 we opened a new forum, The Rant . This is the place for you to express your views and personal opinions. Please keep this content off of the Main Abaco Discussion Forum , we're trying not to scare our new visitors or potential advertisers. Another new forum is Sapodilly's : this is a virtual cafe' where friends gather to chat about almost anything, whether it's related to Abaco or not. And, if you're interested in boating, fishing, and diving in Abaco, visit the Abaco Sportsman Forum.

Now let's look at some of the features of the site. (You may want to print this out and keep it handy for quick reference.) Unlike some other message boards you may have visited, this one has several sections. You can see all of them in the Site Navigation box in the center of the Home page. From the Home or Index Page, you can visit the Main Abaco Discussion Forum , as well as the other sections on the site, including Abaco Sportsman Forum , The Rant , Sapodilly's, the Information/Resources/Links Page , FAQ about Abaco, and the Classified Ad Section.


At the top of our Home or Index Page you'll find a narrow black box that looks like a menu bar. Again, when you first visit the Board, I suggest you click on Register, and simply follow the prompts. Once you register, you'll you’ll be able to post questions and respond to those of others; it's an easy process. Just to the left of Register you’ll find User CP (“CP” stands for Control Panel): within this heading are commands that will allow you to edit your username, email address, signature, avatar, and other personal items. Make sure you scroll down to "Edit Options;" you'll find access to important features such as email and private messaging.

Once you are in your User CP, go to the Networking area and click on Contacts and Friends. Friends are other users you may want to contact directly, either through an email or private message. You can build a library of friends, just type their names in the box, and you can ask them if they want to reciprocate; just check the small box by their name. This feature makes it easy to contact them.

In the Networking area you'll also find Pictures and Albums. Click here, you can start a photo album, perhaps of your last trip to Abaco, and then you can upload as many as 60 photos into that album. You can set up several albums, and when other users click on your name, either on a post or in their Friends & Contacts library, they can access your photo albums.

Back to the Menu Bar at the top of the page: next, you’ll see FAQ; this section pertains to how the forum operates; click on it to see details. Community allows you to access the Member's list, the Calendar, and other features. The Calendar feature allows you to post the dates of your Abaco vacation or other events. The Search feature allows you to enter a key word or two, and bring up threads that contain those words. Below the menu bar is a list of recent threads. You can also search by tags: either type in a key word, or scroll down to the "tag cloud," it contains 70 of the most common tags, just click on one, and a list of threads will appear.

When you are ready to spend some time reading the Board, click on New Posts (either on the menu bar, or in the customized user panel just beneath it on the home page); this will bring up a list of every message that has been posted since your last visit. Click on each topic you are interested in; the initial message and its responses will appear. At the upper left of each thread, just to the left of the date and time, you’ll see a little square. If it is orange, you haven’t marked it as having been read. If it is blue, you have already marked it as having been read. Above the first thread you’ll see View First Unread; click on that to bring up the first message in the thread that you haven’t marked as read. When you’re done with that thread, click New Posts or the “back button” on your browser to get back to your list of unread posts. When you have finished, click on Quick Links, and then Mark Forums Read; next time you visit the board, everything you have read will be marked with a little blue square, and you won’t have to wade through them again. When you get into a thread, at its far right you can click on Display Mode; this will allow you to select how you want the threads organized. I suggest “Linear Mode,” but it’s entirely up to you.

At the bottom of each thread you'll see a little box marked "Tag." The box may contain key words that pertain to the topic covered in that thread. Any user can add a tag, just click the Edit box. If you are looking for information about a specific subject, just click on the word Tag at the end of any post; a box will appear, type one or two key words in it, click Search, and several threads may appear that are relevant to your search.

The Forum is presented in four color schemes; just go to the bottom of any Forum page, and at the left side of the black menu bar click on the "down arrow," your four choices will appear. Click on whichever you prefer, you can change as often as you like.

If two users who share the same computer and email address want to register separately, i.e. two different usernames, that is possible, although it takes a little special effort. After the first person registers, you have to "log out," (the command is at the upper right of the menu bar), then the second user can go through the registration process. But, after each of you have ended a session, you have to log out to allow the other to log in. And, don't check the "remember me" box at the login.

When you post, if you want a different font (Verdana/2/black is the default) ,click the "A/A" icon at the upper right of the compose window, then select your font, size, and color at the left of the window, and post away! If you want to make a long, detailed, post, we suggest you work it up on a word processor program on your computer, and then copy and paste it into the "compose" window. We've heard sad tales of folks who were typing out a long post, got interrupted, the Forum software called a "time out," and the entire post was lost. (You have 30 minutes to compose your post and upload it.) We know you work hard on your compositions, so if you have a big one, work it up, then paste it into the compose window after you have it cleaned up.

New visitors to the Board often stumble when they try to post pictures; here are a few simple tips. First, you have to resize your digital or scanned photo to a maximum height or width of 650 pixels. Most digital cameras and scanners come with some type of photo editing software; mine came with Photoshop Elements, but most of them work in more or less the same way.

Before you start, I suggest you create a temporary file that you can easily access; I put mine on my Desktop. To resize your image, open your photo editing software, then open the image you want to resize. Typically, on the menu bar at the top you'll see Image, or something similar. Click on that menu, and look for Resize. Make sure you check the box that preserves the height/width proportions, then fill in the larger of either width or height with the number 650. Then, save the image as a High Quality jpg in your temporary file, and give it a name that will allow you to identify it. You can do this with several pictures if you like.

If you are running Windows, you may have Microsoft Office Picture Manager already loaded on your computer. The way to check is to open a picture file, then right click on the image. You should see an option Open with, click on this. If your computer has photo software loaded, you should see it, and if it is Microsoft's version, you will see Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Just open your pic with this; next, click on the Edit Pictures button, then you will see an option to resize the photo. Click the Percentage of original button, then reduce the percentage until the max dimension is 650 pixels. If you don't have any software that will resize your image, you can download the popular software Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/). It's free, and it's simple to use.

Next, go back to the Abaco Forum, and either start a new thread, or click Post Reply under the thread in which you want to post your picture. Scroll past the window where you type your post and click Manage Attachments, then click the first Browse button in the box that appears. This will take you to your computer's directory; browse to the temp file where you parked your picture, then click Upload. If you did it correctly, your picture should appear when you finally click Submit Reply.

You can also embed a YouTube video in a post. YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) requires that you edit your piece of video down to less than ten minutes, and filesize under 1 GB. We suggest saving it in an mpeg or Windows Movie format at 320 x 240 pixels, with a filesize under 100 MB. You can try 640 x 480, but that will often yield a filesize of 3-400 MB. It usually takes YouTube 3-4 hours to upload and process a file that big, and the final video quality will be only marginally inproved. If you save your video as an avi file, it will take forever to upload it. YouTube has reasonably understandable directions for uploading video. If you haven't already, sign up and work through the links they provide for processing and uploading video.

I shoot digital video with a Sony PC-1 camcorder (no longer manufactured), and edit it with Pinnacle's Studio software (just Google it, the versions and URLs change frequently). You can purchase a good digital camcorder now for about $400, and many of them will also shoot still pictures. Make sure the camcorder you are considering has an output that is compatible with your computer. Some output their A/V signal through a "firewire" port, and it your computer doesn't have a firewire input, you can't upload it. Many camcorders now record either to an onboard hard drive or a DVD, and output through a USB 2.0 port, which is available on almost all reasonably new computers.

When you're ready to make your post, click New Thread or Reply as you otherwise would when you want to make a post. DO NOT CLICK ON THE SWITCH EDITOR MODE ICON [a/A at the top right] or change fonts, just use the default (Verdana/2) for now, we'll handle that later. Type whatever text you want to precede your video, then skip 2 lines and type the "movie code" of the video clip you want to embed. You'll find it after the "=" character in the URL of the page containing your video. It should look something like this: H8zL3qXvbhU. It must be exactly correct for this to work, we suggest you copy it to your clipboard, then paste it into you post.

After you have done that, highlight the movie code character string with your mouse cursor, and click the red & white YouTube icon at the top right of the compose window, it's right next to the little blue php icon. We suggest you stop here and hit "submit reply;" if you've done the procedure correctly, you should see a static video image with a "play" icon in its center. Just click on the icon and the video should play.

Things get a little trickier if you want to change the font of the text above the video. We suggest you highlight it with your cursor, then select the font, size, and color of the text. After you do this, you may see the string xxxxxxxxx after your text, where "xxxxxx" is the movie code. This string must all be on the same line, no spaces, nothing else on that line. If you really want to abuse yourself and you think you've got the hang of this, you can enter some more text and even another video in the same post, just use the same rules. If you think you are close but just can't get it, send me a PM (just click on my name anywhere) and we'll try to fix it.

A few more things of note: often you’ll see “Trip Reports.” Typically these are daily “diaries” of someone’s recent visit to the area; they often include several posts, one for each day of the trip. They can really give you the flavor of what a visit to Abaco is like. "Countdowns” are posts by folks who have planned a trip and just have to tell everyone how excited they are about coming.

And just one more thing: the word “cay” refers to each of the small offshore islands such as Guana or Elbow. It is pronounced KEE, like those islands in South Florida or that thing that starts your car; pronounce it KAY and everyone will know you’re a newbie!