At the top of nearly every Village page is a link that says Mark everything read. Clicking this will force the system to assume that you have read every single message posted on the entire Village site. Everything will revert to using the "Old Post" icon. You might use this option if you've been away on holiday for a while and come back to the Village to find nearly everything you look at marked as a "New Post". It might be easier for you just to click the Mark everything read link rather than try and read all those posts...

This is the text of the message that you are about to reply to. The rest of the page is concerned with the new message you are about to send in reply.

These little faces are called Emoticons and are here to help you put emotions into your messages. At first glance, this might seem rather trivial, but it is actually rather important. Without them it is extremely difficult to decide the mood of the person posting the message, so if someone made a post like this: You might think to yourself, "So it's raining! Why should I care?". However, if someone posted it like this instead: You know at once that this person isn't happy about the rain. Conversely, if they'd posted this instead: You'd know immediately that this person is happy about the rain.

Note that experienced users of the Internet attach extra meaning to these emoticons which you should know about. Happy or smiley faces mean that a message is meant to be taken lightly; insults or negative words are written in jest and not in anger. Conversely, sad or unhappy faces indicate that a message is written in earnest, and any reply to this message should be voiced in the same vein.

Hopefully you can see how the emoticons help to convey a sense of the emotion of the person posting the message. Having them appear in your reply is simply a matter of clicking them when you want them. For instance, suppose you wanted to tell people about your day. In area C, above, you might type something like this: Perhaps you want to make sure people understand that you're a big fan of the warm weather, and you decide to use the grin emoticon. In area C, make sure your cursor is where you want the face to appear. Then, move your mouse over to area B and click the grin emoticon. Your message in area C will now look like this: Those symbols :-) at the end of the line represent the emoticon, and will be changed into the little smiley picture once you've finished and you click the Post new message button. (If you're wondering why the funny symbols were chosen for this, turn your head ninety degrees to the left and look at them sideways - you should see a simile of a smiling face!) As you might guess, you can, if you want, just type the symbols :-) straight into your message and it will work just the same.

This is where you type the text of your reply. You may notice in the example above that the complete reply text looks something like this, although we've used some highlighting to make things clearer: The first part of the reply text (the bit that isn't highlighted in yellow) has been put there automatically by the system. The system itself is using formatting to show the message that is being replied to, and to do that it has copied in the text and used some special code-words - [QUOTE] and [B] - to make it look nice. You can read about formatting below.

The bit highlighted in yellow - "Hi mate" - is what we are assuming you have typed as a reply.

This set of buttons will help you to apply some formatting to your reply. In a similar way to the emoticons, using these buttons will put strange looking symbols into your message. These symbols are known as "tags". As before, the computer will convert the tags once you've finished and you press the Post new message button. To continue with our example: Suppose you want to underline the word "really", just for emphasis. To begin, place your cursor imediately before the word "really", and click the [U] button. The message will now read: Notice that the special tag [U] has now appeared in your message. This is telling the system that this is where you want the underline to start. To tell the system where to stop the underline, move the cursor to immediately after the word "really", and click the [/U] button. You should end up with this: If you now were to use the Post new message button, your message would appear in the Village like this: Notice how both the underline tags and the emoticon have now been replaced with actual underlining, and the actual picture. The URL, IMG and VIDEO tags are used to place hyperlinks, images and videos into your messages. For example, posting this: Would result in a message like this: The Google link in your message is now clickable. Notice that the full URL has been given, including the http:// part. If you were to just type the following: You'd find that the link would not work correctly.

To insert a picture into your message, you must first upload the picture to a host website. You can not upload pictures directly to the Village - you must upload them somewhere else first. Once you've done this, you can use the [IMG] tags to link to the picture, like this: This would result in a message like this: Likewise for video clips, you'll need to upload them to a hosting website first, then use the [VIDEO] tags to point to them.

The [QUOTE] tag is normally something that you won't actually use. When you make a reply to a post, the system will automatically use the [QUOTE] tag to format the text you are replying to, just to keep things looking nice. Of course, there's nothing stopping you using the tag yourself - it works like the others. Use [QUOTE] to show where the quote starts and [/QUOTE] to show where it ends.