Simple Links
To post simple links simply paste the link and the forum does the rest when you post or preview.
So the plain text:
www.guitarforum.co.za, http://guitarforum.co.za or http://guitarforum.co.za
Automatically becomes: www.guitarforum.co.za,
http://guitarforum.co.za or
http://guitarforum.co.za - with no need for you to do anything else.
"Pretty" links
By creating a link manually, you can make it a pretty link without the full URL showing, like this:
GuitarForum. This comes in particularly useful if you have a very long URL that you want to shorten.
To do this, type the text you want to be linked normally, like this:
GuitarForum
Then highlight the word or phrase you want to link with your cursor and press the hyperlink button
in the toolbar.
This will give you the following:
Now just put an = sign after the first "url" and paste your hyperlink, like this:
[url=http://www.guitarforum.co.za]GuitarForum[/url]
Note that the "=" symbol and the url comes before the closing square bracket.
Formatting the linked text
You can also format the descriptive text as you would normal text, so by adding bold, italic or size tags like this:
[url=http://www.guitarforum.co.za][b]GuitarForum[/b][/url]
you will get links that look like this
GuitarForum
Broken URLs
Occasionally, special characters such as spaces will break a simple URL when the forum links it automatically, like this:
http://www.guitarforum.co.za/an example.html
The solution is easy, just highlight the full URL and click the link button to surround it with the url tags:
http://www.guitarforum.co.za/an example.html
The forum software then knows where the link starts and ends and will link it correctly like this:
http://www.guitarforum.co.za/an example.html
Linking an image
Sometimes you might want to link an image to a URL.
Simply take your image URL (with img tags):
[img]http://guitarforum.co.za/Themes/GFSA2014/images/Logo-120px-3.png[/img]
and surround it with URL tags like this:
[url=http://guitarforum.co.za][img]http://guitarforum.co.za/Themes/GFSA2014/images/Logo-120px-3.png[/img][/url]
...and you get a nice clickable image like this:
Hint
You can also use this same method to link to a full size version of an image that the forum has resized for display:
Just use the same URL for the link as you do for the image like this:
[url=http://ratcliffe.co.za/sundry/DSC_3941.jpg][img]http://ratcliffe.co.za/sundry/DSC_3941.jpg[/img][/url]
Hope that helps...
