If you are posting to the Initial Attack sub-forum, your posts will contain plain text only. We have kept this forum very simple and streamlined in view of its purpose.

The other sub-forums -- the Major Fires/Incidents, General Discussion, and Help! sub-forums -- have more options. On occasion, you may want to emphasize certain words or phrases by making them (for example) bold or italic.

You use vB Code to produce these effects. vB Code is a special set of tags which you can use to produce the most popular text-effects. vB code has the advantage that it is very simple to use.

You may also use smilies, small icons to convey emotion.

You can skip down to Code Buttons and Clickable Smilies to learn more about editing modes, including WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) that make applying bold, italics, etc. very easy.

For more information about vB code, click here.

If you post a new thread, or reply to an existing thread, you can choose to be notified by email when someone else replies to that thread. You can also choose to receive email notifications of new posts in a thread without posting in that thread, by clicking the 'Subscribe to this thread' link displayed in the thread page.

If you choose to stop receiving email notifications from a thread, you can turn off the option by either editing your post, or by unsubscribing from the thread here.

Only registered users may receive email notification, and they can set whether they want to receive email notification by default by editing their options.

Email notification is also referred to as 'Thread Subscription'.

Smilies are small graphical icons which you can insert into your messages to convey an emotion or feeling, such as a joke or embarrassment. For example, if you entered a sarcastic comment, rather than type 'that was a joke', you could simply insert the 'wink' smilie.

If you have used email or internet chat systems, you will probably be familiar with the concept of smilies already. Certain combinations of text characters are converted into smilies. For example,:) is converted into a smiling face. To understand smilie codes, tilt your head to the left and look at the text: you will see that :) represents two eyes and a smiling mouth.

For a list of the smilies currently used by this forum, click here.

On occasions, you may want to prevent the text in your message being converted into smilies. You will see a checkbox which you can select when you make a new post, which will allow you to 'Disable Smilies'.

These controls allow you to quickly and easily enter vB code into your posts and messages. To use them, simply click the appropriate buttons or select items from the lists to enter vBcode.

There is one editor mode -- text editing -- available for the Initial Attack sub-forum.

There are three editor modes available for both the Escaped/Large Fire and Discussion sub-forums: These are Basic, Standard and Enhanced modes.

When using the Basic editor, there are no vBcode buttons to assist your editing. You must enter any vBcode markup manually in this editor. (This is the editor that is default in the Initial Attack sub-forum.)

When using Standard mode, highlight the text you wish to modify and press the appropriate button. This will place the proper vBcode tags around the selected text. Pressing a button while not having any selected text, will insert vBcode tags at your cursor. You may then enter your text between the tags.

When using the Enhanced mode, pressing a button will modify any highlighted text. This mode is a WYSIWYG mode, What You See Is What You Get, whereas your final post appears the same while being edited. Pressing the a button while having no text selected will not have any effect.

To use the clickable smilies, simply click the smiley that you want to insert into your message, or click the Show All Smilies link (if available) to access the full list of smilies.

Message icons allow you to specify a small icon to accompany your posting, which is used to convey the emotion or content of a post at a glance.  Message icons are not available for the Initial Attack Forum, but are available for other forums when starting a new thread or replying. They are only available when using the Advanced Reply mode.

If you have registered, you will be able to edit your posts. Note that administrators can disable this ability as desired. Your ability to edit your posts may also be time-limited, depending on how the administrator has set up the forum.

To edit your posts, click the button by the post you want to edit.

After you have made your modifications, a note may appear, which notifies other users that you have edited your post. Administrators and moderators may also edit your messages but this note may not appear when they do so.

Moderators oversee specific sub-forums. They generally have the ability to edit and delete posts, move threads, and perform other manipulations. Becoming a moderator for a specific sub-forum is usually rewarded to users who are particularly helpful and knowledgeable in the subject of the forum they are moderating. They volunteer their time for which we thank them.

Since we believe cursing and swearing fail to add any beneficial "information" to our forums, we have established a list of words we'd rather not see.  If your posts contain a censored word or words, they will be replaced with asterisks like this: *****.

Coaxsher

Thermo-Gel

The Supply Cache

FEDS

National Firefighter

Wildfire

True North Gear

Colorado Firecamp

Deer Valley Press

Timberline Tool

HuntingGPSmaps

Wildland Firefighter
Foundation