On the main page of the forums, there should be a description under each category about what it includes. Subforums of these forums are also listed in the description.
In each forum, the top line of buttons under the title and page numbers include buttons to post a reply, like, and subscribe. The post a reply takes you to the Full Reply which is explained after this. The like lets the poster know you like their post, and next to this button is "View", which will let you see all the users that have liked the post. The last button is a subscribe button, which will subscribe you to the thread. Based on what you have set in your settings, you will get a notification in email and/or in your notifications. To access your forum settings, go to the gear in the bar at the top of the page (Not the one with Me, Messages, etc) and after going into settings, choose Board preferences. Under this, you can go to posting preferences and choose whether you want to be notified of a reply or not.
At the bottom of forum posts, you should be able to find two buttons called "Quick Reply" and "Full Reply". If you want to write something short and stay on the page, it might be preferable to use Quick Reply. If you are planning to write something longer, such as an explanation of how the forums work, you most likely want to use Full Reply.
Full reply has 3 parts that can be useful for posting or seeing what you are going to post. If you are using BBCode, which is found about the text box you are writing your reply in, you can see if it does what you want it to by clicking Preview. If you want to save your post to work on it later, you can click Save. This can be accessed through your settings page, which can be found if you click the gear in the top bar, and then select Manage drafts. This will let you select which draft you are editing, and return you to the topic. If you click the title of the draft, it will only pull up the draft and you will not be able to submit it through that part of the site. To get to the page where you can submit your post, click Load draft. Of course, to post your work you can choose to Submit it.
After your post is sent, you can go back to the post and do a variety of things. The first choice you have is to edit it, which just returns you to the screen where you wrote it in the first place. The second is to remove it, such as if you sent the same post twice or did not mean to post it. The last two are on all posts: report and quote with reply. Report is used when something against the site rules is posted, and quote with reply can be used if you are quoting something from another forum or to quote something earlier in the thread so people know what you are referring to.
I probably skipped over a lot of things but please ask if you are confused about any of this or another aspect of the forums :s
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