Tips & Tricks to enhance your VU Hoops experience

Many people come to VU Hoops every day, yet only a subset of those visitors leave their marks & thoughts in the comments. If you're one of the visitors who would like to be more active on the site, but may be overwhelmed, we have this brand new Tips & Tricks Guide to enhance your participation in this Villanova Community.

How do I get started?

If you haven’t registered to comment on VU Hoops yet, it’s easy…

1. Click on the Sign Up link in the upper right hand corner

2. Pick a username, enter your email, and create a password. Or you can register via Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Yahoo by clicking on the respective icon.

3. Enter your details (with the secure SBN Privacy Policy)…

And you are good to go. Just make sure to login when you come back to the site and you’ll now be able to comment as well as see what comments are new since your last visit.

How do I comment?

Well, first of all, you need to be logged in. Click on that LOGIN link in the upper right.

Well, duh, but HOW do I comment?

First of all, do you want to make a new comment on the article or do you reply to someone else?

To make a new comment just head to the bottom of the Comments Section and enter your thoughts.

What you enter in the Subject will be in bold, and the message is where a longer message can be typed.

Preview let's you check out how it will appear before anyone else can see it (because maybe you marked up the text or entered an image- but more on that later).

And then Post let's the world view your thoughts. Do that and your comment will now be at the bottom of the comments thread.

What was this Reply that you mentioned?

Sometimes another member of the community may make a comment that you would like to reply to, just click reply under their comment and the same dialogue box will appear.

Then, your new comment will appear under the the original comment.

OK. Cool. I can bold stuff and put words in italics?

Yep. You sure can. After you type what you want, highlight the word you want to be italicized, click the I and it will appear like this.

Same with bolding?

Yep

And hyperlinks?

Should be familiar. I want to send people to seaotters.com

And that S with a line through it? Is that a foreign currency?

Nope, that's the strikethrough formatting feature.

Alright so I get that, but sometimes weird things happen when I type certain combos of characters - what's up with that?

Yep... consider these as easter egg shortcuts for italics, strikethrough, bulleting, emoji...

For example when you type some things in the comment section:

BOLDING: I want to eat *pizza*. WILL TURN INTO: I want to eat pizza.

STRIKETHROUGH: I want to -test- this funness. WILL TURN INTO: I want to test this funness.

NUMBER LIST:

# Mike

# Brian

# Chris

# Ed

# Ryan

Will show up as...

1. Mike
2. Brian
3. Chris
4. Ed
5. Ryan

Tell me more about this emoji list. Please?

Head to http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com and copy and paste :basketball: in the comments.

Whoa. Sneaky. What about pictures? How do I put those in there?

First, you need a URL for the image (it'll start with http: and end with .jpg or .gif or .png). Click on the image icon and insert...

That sounds nice and all, but what about one of those cool, fancy, animated gif things?

It's the same thing, but the URL will end in .gif. Looking for a great place for animated gifs to capture your sentiment? Head to Giphy.com.

What if I have an image on my computer that I want to share?

Well, first you need to put it on the World Wide Web. You can create a Dropbox account where you can put files in the cloud. From there, if you put something in the public folder, you can get the URL and share with the world.

Yeah, I don't understand the quote thing. Why would I want to use that?

Well, maybe you are sharing a link and want to pull out a small piece of text (because copying and pasting someone else's work would be a no-no). You could use this feature to enhance your comment. First, highlight the text you want to be quoted and then go. The end result will look like this.

And what's up with that Black Box? Did you know that an airplane's black box isn't really black?

Ahh, that's the Spoiler feature. Say you're a Game of Thrones watcher* on the east coast and you have respect for the awesome members of the community who live on the West Coast... now when some dragon or goblin or zombie kills you can use this feature.

Readers will see the following...

and then THEY can mouseover the black text to see that Stonebane Darkwind and Kyrus Valorheart were executed.

* I do not watch Game of Thrones

I notice some people insert stuff from the Twitter machine. How do I do that voodoo magic?

OK, we're upping the ante of the commenting game and taking it to a new level here. If you find a tweet that you want to "embed" into the comments, head to that specific tweet on twitter.com. From there, click the elipsis like this...

After you choose "Embed Tweet", you'll see this...

From there, just copy that code snippet and paste it into the comment section (not the subject), like this...

THEN... Voila! you've embedded a tweet in your comment!

Alright, so I made a comment. How do I share that with the world?

Each comment has its own URL. That is the Date | Time at the bottom of the comment. If you click on that link and grab the URL, that will share the direct link to your comment.

Now, I see you have a tagline in every.single.one. of your comments? Can I do that too?

Yep, it's pretty simple. Start by clicking on your name in the top right corner.

If you click Edit Profile from the dropdown, you can then update your profile picture, signature, and other information.

Gee. I think I know it all now. But let's say I have this really long comment that could be its own article?

Sounds like a great opportunity to write a FanPost. You could click on the Post Your Own link at the bottom of the FanPost section, or just go here.

I'm a sarcastic S-O-B, how can people know that?

Start & end your sarcasm with an @ and it will show up in a unique font. Now...

@I love St. Joe's@

will show up as...

I love St. Joe's

Now everyone will know you're being funny... or at least trying to be.

Alright. Cool. I guess that's it, huh?

Yeah, pretty much. There are some other things around the site. Like, don't forget about the info in the main navigation bar. Under Library, you'll find cool things like easy & quick links to the Roster Outlook, VU Hoops Hall of Fame, and link to our partner store for official Villanova gear.