First off welcome to the forum and the VTR 1000. You will find us a helpful bunch on here with plenty of useful advice and guidance along with some friendly banter. If you are ever unsure of anything then don't be afraid to ask, especially when it comes to workshop or mechanical questions.
As new members you most likely don't know your way around the forum just yet. So this thread is here to provide you with some relevant links and info to get you started.
Using the Forum
Please take the time to read the forum rules Note that members are required to have a minimum of 50 posts before posting in the Sales and Wants section of the forum. As a result of this you also wont be able to send Private Messages (PM) to other members, though you will be able to receive and read private messages from others who have the required post count.
How to Create a New Thread and Post
Choose a section of the forum to start a new topic and post in. Try and keep things to the the relevant section, you then select New Topic from the bottom of the page.

Then give the topic a relevant title. Please think carefully about this one "look at this". " "you gotta see this", "Please help" etc etc does not help anyone when searching. Try to put yourself in search mode, what would you type if searching for your topic, pick a few hit words and try to incorporate these into the title, you have a maximum of 60 characters.

Then type out your post making use of the available text formatting features from the toolbar. The forum uses BBCode which is a markup language similar to html For more info on BBCode see the following BBCode.org

Once your happy you can Submit from the the button at the bottom of the page. It helps to preview things first and have a quick read through, check spelling etc.

How to Add an Avatar - Profile Picture
You can upload or link to an avatar from the User Control Panel at the top of the page. You then select the profile tab along the top of the control panel and Edit avatar tab from the left. So that's user control panel/profile/edit avatar. There is a maximum file size and image dimensions listed. If you need to resize an image then you can do so from the following online tool.
http://www.shrinkpictures.com/create-avatar/
Adding Images to your Posts
The forum does not allow you to directly upload images into your posts. To add images to your posts you need to use one of the many online image hosting sites. You can then copy and paste the code across into your posts.
How to Post Pictures Using Photobucket
How to Put Pictures in your Posts
How to Add YouTube Movies to your Posts
This can be a tricky one. Do not use the youtube embed code that they supply under the share tab. This does not work for forum posts, you need to copy the URL directly. It's not always a straight forward copy and paste into youtube tags though and can take some tweaking.
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[youtube]url goes here[/youtube]
Example from Youtube
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A8VfwLFQnrA#!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8VfwLFQnrA
Note that if your logged into your YouTube account then the URL may be on a secure server shown as https In this case remove the s from the end of the protocol back to http.
I have found that if you have a URL that contains a lot of confusing characters it is not so easy to break down. Under these circumstances copy and paste the title of the movie into the youtube search box and select the movie from the search and 9 times out of 10 it returns an abbreviated form of the previous URL.
Forum Search Tools
The forum has a reasonably good search and advanced search facility at the top of the page but is limited. A better alternative is to do a google site search as follows:
By adding your search query first followed by site: and the forum URL including the HTTP:// at the start.
Example
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forum search site:http://www.vtr1000.org/
For more info on how to use the forum see the Frequently Asked Questions
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