Crestline Soaring Society

Welcome to the NEW CSS Pilot's Forum


You'll find posting here to be pretty straightforward, with some advanced formatting features available if you want to use them. The most important step is taking a moment to define your posts by picking a category or two from the lists above the 'Body' section where you type in your post's content. See Categories: Unleash the Power! before making your first post.

Here are some notes about using the new forum.

Posting: Simple or Complex - Your Choice

1. Plain Text posting to the new forum is pretty simple - just pick some categories, type away, and click 'Submit' or 'Preview' and don't fool with the options. You can use BBCode or a subset of HTML tags to enhace your posts. BBCode is the default input format - to use Filtered HTML (if you really want to) expand the 'input format' link and choose from the list. This post was formatted using BBCode tags. Carriage returns and blank lines are automatically detected; to ensure a blank line appears, type a space before the carriage return.
   

Want to add a jpg or gif image to your forum posts?
It's almost brain-dead easy - here's how:

Click the 'Add Image' icon in the forum posting form and follow some instructions to upload the image and insert a thumbnail into your post.

1. Choose the relevant gallery section for your image
2. Enter a title and find your image with the browse button.
3. You can add a caption or explanatory text. This is what people will see when they view the image in the galleries, so it doesn't hurt to add a sentence or two here, even if it seems redundant to what's in your post - it won't show up in your post.
   

We have a module installed in the website backend that allows including Google Maps images in forum posts and other content pages. When posting, you can find a link to the tool by expanding the 'Input Format' section and clicking the link under the bbCode section. Learning to use the gmaps functionality is not for the faint of heart, but it has its uses. I've written the explanation below and inserted it into the tool page as well to help those who want to includes maps - please read it before and while using the tool.

Fall 2006 - The categorization options for forum posts have been removed, with the thought that it might be deterring pilots who just wanted to put a simple post on the site. These categorization options still apply to non-forum content that one might want to add.

The original CSS Pilots Forum was very much time-driven - as posts aged they dropped onto the back pages and out of mind, only very rarely getting read or replied to. There's a lot of knowledge in those archives, but mining it would take much dedication and time.