Welcome to the FIAT Forum!

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Welcome to the FIAT Forum!

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Welcome to
fiatforum.png

It's great to have you on board! :)

Your registration is now complete and you're a fully signed up member, so if you already know how forums work and you can navigate around by yourself - then feel free to jump straight in (y)

If however, you're new to all this and a bit lost, then we've created this little guide below to help you out.

  • Site Layout
  • Posting a New Thread
  • Uploading Photos
  • Selling Your Stuff
  • Supporting the Forum / Getting Rid of Adverts

One of our mods Freebo also wrote an awesome guide for other areas of the site, so check this out if you're still not quite sure of you way around :)

Signed - Your faithful moderator team :cool:
(A list of us all can be found here)
 
Site Layout

Site Layout - Don't be afraid, it's not as complicated as it looks!

For the purposes of this post, we're going to assume you are looking at the main page (https://www.fiatforum.com) as that is where it all begins :)


The Navbar

navbar-top.png


This stays hovering at the top of every page, so you can easily access the most important parts of the site and is broken down like this:
  • [FF] logo will take you back to the homepage of the site.
  • Filling anything into the search box and hitting 'Enter' will search the whole site for those terms.
  • [Model Jump] allows you to quickly get to a specific model's subforum without needing to navigate via the main page.
  • Clicking on your username will show the user control menu, which lets you access all your account goodies
  • The blue box with a number inside is your 'Alerts Box' - clicking on this number will show a drop down menu allowing you to quickly view them.
  • And finally, the green box is your unread PM (Private Message) alert box - clicking it will take you directly to the PM listing screen.
Once you start using the more advanced features of the forum, such as "Custom URLs" (in the User CP) - these links will also appear in the user control menu.


The Homepage

Don't be alarmed by the masses of sections on the homepage, once we break it down, it all makes sense!

The sections are all separated under categories (defined by an orange background bar), grouping them logically together.

Quick Hint - If you want to get straight into the car talk, scroll DOWN until you hit either "Abarth Cars", "FIAT Cars", "FIAT MPVs" or "FIAT Commercials" - depending on what you own ;)
  • FIAT Forum - These subforums are all related to the running on the forum, latest news, ideas and suchlike can be found here :)
  • Members Zone - All the forums especially for you guys. If you've just joined, why not post a hello message in the New Central forum, or if you want to show off your car, put a thread up in Members Motors.
  • General - As the name suggests, the general topics go in these forums. Some people say it should go at the bottom, but .... meh :p
  • Clubs and Events - All the social forums! If you want to meet real life people, these are the forums you need to peruse!
  • Buying and Selling - As it sounds, everything money transfer related in here.
  • Miscellaneous - All the car talk things that aren't specific to any model (for model specific, use the forums below)
  • Abarth Cars - All the Abarth models dedicated forums.
  • FIAT Cars - Exactly what it says on the tin.
  • FIAT MPVs - All of the people carrier forums.
  • FIAT Commercials - The workhorse FIAT forums (y)
If you keep going further down the page, you'll then bump into the forum statistics, who's online section plus a list of upcoming events (though this is shown better on the Events Map).
 
Posting a New Thread

Posting a New Thread - Getting your voice heard

Excellent, you're now ready to get your message out to the masses!

If this is your first thread, why not post an introduction to yourself in the Newbie Central forum first, just to say hello - everyone would love to welcome you to the site!

So, let's say you've picked your section and you're browsing the forum in question (for this example, let's use the Barchetta forum) - look just above the thread listings and you'll see the "New Thread" button.

new-thread.png



Press that, and you'll get the "New Thread" page up (da dah!) - which should look exactly like this.

new-thread-form.png



So now it's just a case of filling it all in :) For your title, try to use something descriptive about the post (ie - some like like "My throttle is stuck", rather than just "Help") - this will get your thread more noticed, and also helps with search engines spidering you!

If you've already uploaded some images to your gallery and want to easily insert them into your post, click the
photo_popup.png
button and it will let you choose, or if you want to attach a new file to the post, then use the
attach.gif
button.

Once it's all in, simply hit the "Submit New Thread" button at the bottom and your creation will be available for all to see!

Note - Some forums don't use Prefixes, so the first box might not be there...
 
Uploading Images

Uploading Images - Pictures paint a thousand words

There are two basic ways to get your images uploaded to the forum:
  • Gallery Images - Photos uploaded directly to your personal gallery space.
  • Attachments - Which are images attached to a single post and uploaded from the new post/thread page.

Option 1 - Uploading to your gallery space

As a registered member of the forum, you automatically get 20MB of diskspace to upload your images to. If you want more, then a single donation will entitle you to UNLIMITED space!

To get started with the gallery, choose the "Gallery" link from the blue navigation bar at the top of the page, then click the "Upload Photos" link which can be found at the top right of the gallery page.

You'll then get the Gallery Upload page up, which looks like this..

gallery-upload-1.png


You can pretty much leave all of this at default - just check you are uploading to the right category (the underlined box at the top) - you can leave this as "Member Galleries" if you don't need to categorise it - then hit the "Select Files for Upload" to choose the pictures you want to send.

They will start uploading automatically, so let them get to 100% - then when you've done all the ones you want, press the "Upload/Submit" button to get them processed by the system.

After a few seconds, you'll get the "Add Photos" screen up, which is just your chance to check the gallery is correct and write a description for the photos you sent.

gallery-upload-2.png


If everything is ok, press the "Process" button at the bottom, and you're all done - your pictures will be put in your gallery (y)

Quick Tip - You can easily insert your gallery photos into posts by using the
photo_popup.png
button.




Option 2 - Attaching files to a post

Once you have got all your images together and you have finished writing the text for your post (or you can do this as you go along, it's up to you) - click the
attach.gif
icon found at the top of the editor to bring up the attachments manager:

upload_1.gif


Use the browse button to bring up a file dialog box from which you can navigate to the files on your computer. Once you have repeated for each of the images, hit the "Upload" button and they will be sent to the FF server. If you have more than 5 images, do the first 5, then next 5 etc etc...

Once some images are uploaded, the Attachments Manager will change to reflect this:

upload_2.gif


Finally click the "Close this Window" link at the top to return to the editor.

Placing an image is simplicity itself, place the cursor where you want the image (or images) to go and click the
menupop.gif
icon found next to the attachments (
attach.gif
) icon and select the image (or file) from the drop down menu, for example:

dropdown.gif


On your page, the attachment will then be inserted (though you will only see it as ATTACH text) which can then be aligned as you wish.... (note the number shown will differ each time, it relates to the individual attachment)

attach.gif


See, simple wasn't it!
 
Selling Your Stuff

Selling Your Stuff - Having a clear out

We have a strict policy on the forum that all for sale ads must be posted in the classifieds section and not just posted into the forums.

Don't worry though this is very simple to do!

Step One - Head over to the classifieds section.

Step Two - Click on the big
place-ad.png
button!

Step Three - Choose the type of ad you are posting
classifieds-1.png


Step Four - Choose the subcategory for your ad
classifieds-2.png


Step Five - Fill in all the fields, being sure to attach pictures for a more popular viewing.

And that's it - once placed, your ad will also appear in the relevant sections on the forum (for example, placing an ad for a FIAT 500 will make it appear in the right hand bar of the 500 forum).
 
Supporting the Forum / Getting Rid of Adverts

Supporting the Forum - Getting Rid of Adverts

Whilst the forum is totally free to use, if you do feel like you want to help out, there are a couple of things you could do :)

Make a Donation
Any amount, big or small, is very welcome to us. Being a donated member also gives you a few extra benefits like a custom user title and unlimited gallery space - you can easily make a Paypal donation from the donations page.

Become a Forum Friend
If you donate £15 or more in a year, you will become an honourary "Forum Friend" which will remove all advertising from your forum experience and also give you access to our exclusive Forum Friends offers :)

Become a Moderator
Now if you *really* want to get involved with the day-to-day running of the forum, you can apply to become a moderator. You'd be incharge of your own section and get to help make the forum a friendlier place.

You do need to have made 100 posts before you can apply - so make sure you get posting some useful content, this will go a long way to helping your app!
 
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