The main rule is no attacking others. It is never okay to call someone names or insult their mother. Using foul language, cross-posting, or posting spam will get your post deleted pretty quickly as well.

There are many other additional suggestions described in the Best Practices document for posting to the message boards. (The link for this document can always be found directly under the Boards menubar option.) Most of these are common sense kind of things that are equally applicable to any message boards or forums you use on the Internet.

If you view the Recent Threads, it will show all threads, including ignored ones, with an option to unignore the thread. As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn't ignore a thread unless you really mean it since it tends to cause a chicken-and-egg issue. The thread is ignored, so it's hard to find links for it, but unless you can find links to it, you can't unignore it. The easiest way for most people is to look at the list of recent threads and unignore the thread from that page.

If the thread is not recent, you're out of luck. You need to find a link for the ignored thread, but you would need someone who can still see the thread to send you that link at which point you can unignore the thread.

You can mark any board as a favorite, however, it might require two steps to do so. Each board is assigned to a specific Member Group. If you are not part of the group, Atlas Quest assumes you have no interest in reading any of the boards on it, so it doesn't make any sense to be able to mark it as a favorite. It's like saying you hate cheese, but then you want the cheese board to be your favorite. Make up your mind!

So before marking boards as favorites or not, check that you are a member of the group it's a part of. At that point, you can add individual boards from the groups as favorites or to be ignored.

In theory, if you find a board and mark it as a favorite, Atlas Quest is supposed to automatically make you a member of the associated group if you aren't already. BUT! It is possible there are bugs. If you find an instance of this happening, please inform the Green Tortuga. Additionally, if you later choose to remove yourself from that member group, it will no longer save any of your favorite board from that group. If you leave the group, you essentially walk away from the boards that are a part of it as well.

So to have a board marked as a favorite, you must be a member of the group it is a part of.

Each message board is assigned to specific member groups, so first you must identify a group for your board. You can create message boards in any group that you own or are an admin on, so most people normally have to create a new group if they haven't already. If you want a board that anyone and everyone can read and post to, make sure your group is public.

When you create a group, the first message board is automatically created with the same name as that of the group. You can edit the message board name or delete it completely if that default does not suit you. You can also add additional message boards to your group if you find such a setup useful. For instance, if you created an "Outdoor Sports" group, you may want several boards for each of the outdoor sports you want your group to cover. As a good rule of thumb, it's usually best to have one board that can cover any topic within a group, then as that board gets busy or cluttered, create new boards to keep things better organized.

You can add, modify, and delete boards from the group details page.

The message boards have various buttons available—funny, educational, interesting, agree, disagree, etc. But there's also the "rude" button, which doesn't work quite like the others. The other buttons allow you to see how many people have clicked on it, but the rude button will only show you a maximum of one click—your own, if you had clicked it. This button is used primarily for moderators to better monitor problem posts, including those that might not technically break any official Atlas Quest rules but are inappropriately harsh or rude. Moderators have special tools available to see which posts are the 'rudest' and who is generating rude posts most often to better keep track of potential problems before they become full-fledged problems.

Only moderators can see the actual number of people who've clicked the rude button to help alleviate hurt feelings if someone thinks it's funny to click rude on lots of posts that are not actually rude. Additionally, Atlas Quest does some additional processing of rude clicks so if you chronically abuse the button yourself, your clicks will not be reported to moderators anymore. Basically, if you cry wolf too often, moderators will ignore your clicks. So your better off using it solely on posts that you genuinely feel are rude or otherwise inappropriate for the message boards.

When you write a new post, you'll see two drop-down lists. The first is labeled Group and the second is labeled Board. By default, the group will be set to the Everybody group, and the board options will show only the boards assigned to that group. If the board you're looking for is in the everybody group, simply select it.

If the board you are interested in is not in the Everybody group, you must change the group to the one that has the board. For instance, all boards for US states and regions are in the United States Letterboxing group. If you change the group to this, the board options will change to include all of the state and regional boards in the United States.

More of the most commonly used message boards are in the Non-Traditional Boxes group and the Yakking It Up group.

The simplest, quickest, and most common search you'll likely run on the message boards is to look for posts with a specific keyword or phrase within the message. You can run this type of search from most any message board page just by entering the keyword in the search box in the upper-right corner of the page. For more advanced search options such as searching for posts by specific members, on specific boards, during a specific timespan, and more, use the dedicated Search Messages page.

A few things to know about keywords searches. First, searches are case-insensitive, so capitalization will not matter. Second, some common words are automatically ignored such as and, then, don't, etc. These are called stopwords, and the full list of stopwords used are:

a, ain't, all, am, an, and, any, aq, are, aren't, as, at, be, became, because, been, being, box, boxed, boxes, boxing, but, by, came, can, can't, cannot, cant, co, com, could, couldn't, did, didn't, do, does, doesn't, doing, don't, each, edu, eg, either, else, et, etc, even, ever, every, ex, far, few, for, further, get, gets, getting, given, gives, go, goes, got, had, hadn't, has, hasn't, have, haven't, having, he, he's, her, here, here's, hers, herself, hi, him, himself, his, how, however, i, i'd, i'll, i'm, i've, ie, if, in, inc, into, is, isn't, it, it'd, it'll, it's, its, let, let's, letterbox, letterboxed, letterboxer, letterboxers, letterboxes, letterboxing, many, may, maybe, me, mean, might, much, must, my, myself, no, non, none, nor, not, now, of, oh, ok, okay, on, only, onto, or, our, ours, park, per, re, really, seem, seemed, seeming, seems, seen, series, she, should, shouldn't, since, so, sub, sup, th, than, thank, thanks, thanx, that, that's, thats, the, their, theirs, them, then, there, there's, theres, these, they, they'd, they'll, they're, they've, this, those, though, thus, to, too, trail, un, up, us, value, very, via, was, wasn't, way, we, we'd, we'll, we're, we've, were, weren't, whether, which, while, why, with, won't, would, wouldn't, yes, yet, you, you'd, you'll, you're, you've, your, yours, yourself, yourselves

Any word you attempt to search for in this list will be ignored.

Search Operators

By default, Atlas Quest will return all searches that include one or more of the keywords you specify. You can, however, change that behavior through the use of operators. Supported operators include:

Operator	Result
+	A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every post returned.
-	A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any post returned.
( )	Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions
*	An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word, not prepended.
"	A phrase that is enclosed in double quotes matches only posts that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.
@distance	Tests tests whether two or more words all start within a specified distance from each other, measured in words. Specify the search words within a double-quoted string immediately before the @distance operator.
<>	These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it.

Examples

Search	Results
apple banana	find posts that contain at least one of these words
+apple +juice	find posts that contain both words
+apple -macintosh	find posts that contain the word “apple” but not “macintosh”
+(apple banana) -macintosh	find posts that contain “apple” or “banana”, but not “machintosh”
apple*	find posts that contain “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, “applet”, etc.
"some words"	find posts that contain “some words of wisdom”, but not “some noise words”
"word1 word2 word3" @8	finds posts that contain the words “word1”, “word2” and “word3”—BUT only if all three words are located within 8 words of each other.
+apple +(>turnover <strudel)	Find rows that contain the words “apple” and “turnover”, or “apple” and “strudel” (in any order), but rank “apple turnover” higher than “apple strudel”.

There are certain subjects that, when discussed, invariably wind up in heated discussions that wind up causing hurt feelings and other problems. They shouldn't, but like a moth to a flame, it happens. Unless you have a very thick skin, it's suggested that you don't delve too much into the following subjects:

• Why do people keep their logbook private?
• Why don't some letterboxers like geocaching?

Sometimes, people start using the message boards more as chat rooms, so we restrict the number of posts people can make over a period of time. The limits, as of July 14, 2014, are set to a maximum of 50 posts per 24 hours and a maximum of 15 posts per hour. For the vast majority of people, you'll never hit these limits.

If you do hit the limits, no big deal. Just wait a bit before trying to post again. You don't even have to wait a full 24 hours (or 1 hour for hourly restrictions) to post again—you just have to wait until your oldest post drops off from the last 24 hours (or 1 hour for hourly restrictions).

Another option to help reduce the chances of hitting these limits is to reply to several posts in the same thread within a single post. A bunch of one-sentence posts can often annoy people and combining several short replies into a single reply just seems to "flow" better for people.

Most of the time, simply typing in a URL will automatically turn it into a link. For instance, http://www.atlasquest.com will display as a link automatically with no special formatting. You do, however, have to type the full link. Just typing www.atlasquest.com won't do it.

Additional formatting options can be found on the Markup Comparisons page, including how to turn any text into a link (like the "Markup Comparisons" link does). There are two formatting options available including wiki and HTML. By default, all new accounts are set to use wiki formatting since it's generally easier and faster to use, so unless you've changed your default preferences, you should probably use the wiki formatting options.

Unfortunately, at this time, the answer is no.

This video includes a quick rundown of how to navigate the message boards and what all of the individual icons on each post are for.

Click the bookmark button () once to bookmark a post, then clicking it a second time will remove the bookmark and it'll be greyed out.