Wherever you go in the Grey Tower, you will stumble upon message boards. They are the very core of this community, making it possible for the members of the Grey Tower to roleplay and interact. During your time here, it is likely you will come to the point you'll want to make a message board, be it for a class you will teach or for a major roleplay you will host.

Most message boards in the Grey Tower are hosted by disc.server.com. This is a free host and gives access to threaded message boards that can be used by anyone at all. They are, however, heavily sponsored, and ads and popups will always be part of them. For a class or major roleplay, it is often easiest to register one of those message boards and use it. One of the good things about message boards is the possibility to customize them to your taste. In order to do this, you need to write a stylesheet and I will guide you through making one, step by step.

Step 1: Making a message board
Step 2: Finding images and colours
Step 3: Hosting
Step 4: Making a stylesheet
Step 5: Configuring your MB
Step 6: Special features
Step 7: Moderating your MB

Step 1: Making a message board
The first thing to do is open a new browser, and go to http://server.com/communityapps/discussionapp/. On this page, scroll down and click on the text "Set up a DiscussionApp for your site now! It's easy!". You will be taken to a simple form where you can set up the name of your forum, the e-mail you're using and a password. If you plan to let someone else moderate the board together with you, choose a password that you don't use elsewhere ;) Once you have filled this in, click on "Submit form" and on the next page, fill in your password.

The page you are taken to is your maintenance page, and I advice you to bookmark it, because all editing of your message board will be done here. The second link from the top is the URL of your new message board. You can click on it to see what it looks like right now - not much to look at, don't you think?

Now, you have two options. You can either decide to be lazy, and use one of the stylesheets that I have created for your use, or you can decide you are courageous and make your own layout. If you choose the first option, choose a stylesheet and scroll directly to step 5. Otherwise, happily continue reading below ;)

Step 2: Finding images and colours
Let the maintenance page be for now, and open a notepad or an empty word document to keep notes on. You may want to make a new directory on your harddrive to temporarily store notes and the stylesheet you'll make later, that way you'll keep the clutter to a minimum! Before you can make the stylesheet, you need a few things.

1. A background image.
Although some people like to use images that show entire scenes or landscapes, I tend to prefer simply coloured backgrounds, that add a feel to the message board but do not make it look chaotic. You can either go to Google and use the image search to find a background, or go to a page that offers free background images. A few good sites to find background images are Julianne's Background Textures, Absolute Background Textures and Background City (for less abstract images). Browse around, and once you find a picture you like, right-click on it and choose "Save image as" to store the image on your hard drive.

2. A background colour.
My only advice here: choose a colour that resembles your background. Some people have slow internet connections, and if a background image takes a while to load they will first see your text on your background colour. To find the hexadecimal code of a colour you like, you can use this chart.Copy the hexadecimal code of your colour (e.g. #FFFFFF for white or #000000 for black) onto your notepad, and keep it there for a while.

3. Colours for text and links.
On this same resource page, find a contrasting colour to write your text in, and a different but also contrasting colour for your links. Note them down too, we will be using them soon! If you like, you can choose another colour to emphasize links the mouse is hovered over.

Step 3: Hosting
Not everyone has their own website, and some space is needed to host your background image and (in a later stage) your stylesheet on. If you cannot upload it to a website of your own, mail your background image to the Grey Tower and ask admin to host it for you. They will reply with the URL of your picture, make sure to note it down for you will need it in your stylesheet. When your stylesheet is ready, you can also mail it to the Grey Tower to have it hosted.

Step 4: Making a stylesheet
The most important step now! First, open an empty notepad and copy the text in the box below into it:

Now replace the pieces of code I put in red:

- Replace "BACKGROUND" with the hexadecimal code of your background colour (don't forget the # !);
- Replace "http://background.com/image.jpg" with the full URL of your background image (include http://);
- Replace "LINK" with your link colour, and "ALINK" with the colour of the hover/active link if you have chosen one, or with the link colour if you haven't;
- If you want, you can choose a different font.

Once you have done this, save the file as a stylesheet, thus with the extension .css instead of .txt . Congratulations, your stylesheet is now ready to be used! Upload it to your own website, or ask the Grey Tower to host it for you, and once you have the URL of it you are able to proceed to the last step.

Step 5: Configuring your MB
Now, go back to your maintenance page to implement your new stylesheet. Click on the icon to go to the page where all edits are made, and first of all, scroll down to the box labeled "Style Sheet" and put the full URL of your stylesheet in there. Make sure to click the "Change style sheet" button as soon as you've done it: disc.server.com doesn't remember changes if you change different things at the same time. Now that you've done that, your stylesheet has been linked to the message board, and if you go to your message board you should see your background image and the colours you have chosen. If you don't see that, make sure you did not misspell the URL and check if the stylesheet is still where you thought it would be. If it isn't, contact the person who is hosting it for you!

The next step is the configuration of your header and footer file. Disc.server.com has automatically created one for you, but you don't necessarily have to use it. Scroll up on the maintenance page to the field labeled "Prologue", and be bold and delete everything in it ;) Now, you can add your own text to it. For a simple header and some introductory text, use the code below:

replacing the red text by anything you like. You can use all HTML tags in here, a few examples are listed below.

In the "Epilogue" box, leave only this line

It will be a quick link back to your maintenance page.
After that, find "Sort threads in order of" and click on the "creation" radiobutton, then click "Submit changes".

You're done!

Step 6: Special features
Although you have a nice message board now, there are some other options to explore. The line breaks, for example. By default, these are the simple horizontal rules you are used to, but you can also find a lot of nice graphics on the internet to make these look better. Some nice horizontal rules can be found here, or a simple Google search on "horizontal rules" will get you to loads of pages.
To use a nice line on your message board, upload the picture of your choice somewhere and in the "Thread Break" field, replace the <hr> tag with <img src="http://the.address.of/yourrule.jpg">. Click "Submit changes" and you're done!

If you're handy with HTML, you can use the Prologue and Epilogue for virtually every bit of webpage making you like, truly integrating the message board into a webpage.

Step 7: Moderating your MB
Your message board is up and running, and students will soon flow into your class, or daring RPers will be entering the terrain of your major roleplay. Of course, sometimes things go wrong, and your maintenance page is the place to right those wrongs. To edit or delete messages, click on the "Admin" link on the bottom of your message board, and log in using your password. This time, click on the icon and you will see a simplified view of the threads that are currently on your message board.

To edit or delete a message, find it in the list and click on it. To edit it, click the "Edit Message" button and change whatever needs to be changes, then click "Change message". To delete it, click either the "Delete Message" button to delete only the message you are looking at or the "Delete Message and Replies" button to also delete all responses to the message you're removing.

This tutorial was written by Aleatha Sedai. If you still have any questions, do not hesitate to e-mail me with any of them - I'd love to help!