Forums, Topics, and Posting

This guide walks the geography of forums and topics, and what to do once there's a cursor blinking in a reply box.

Looking for the editor itself, the how of making text bold, dropping in an image, or switching to Markdown? That all lives over in The Post Editor. This guide is about posting; that one's about writing.

The lay of the land

Myth-Weavers has two flavors of forum:

• Game forums belong to a single game. The GM creates them when the game spins up — usually Announcements, OOC, In-Character, Characters — and only that game's members can see and post (unless the game's visibility is set wider). This is where your campaign lives.
• Community forums are site-wide: General Discussion, Tabletop RPG chatter, recruitment talk, site feedback. Open to everyone with an account. This is where you go when the game is between scenes and you want to talk shop.

Within each forum, conversations live in Topics (threads, by another name), and each topic is a chronological string of Posts.

Inside a game

Open a game, whether from the My Games sidebar on the home page or out of the Game Directory, and you'll arrive at the game home at /games/<slug>.If the game has a cover image larger than its header card, a maximize icon appears in the card's top-right corner. You can click it to view the full, uncropped image. The tabs along the top are your table of contents:

• Game — the landing tab. Name, description, GM, roster, recent activity, any pinned announcements.
• Forums — the list of the game's forums. The most-visited tab during normal play.
• Members — who's at the table, what role they play.
• Characters — the character roster; see Characters, Resources, and Maps.
• Resources — wiki Pages, Blogs, Downloads, Maps, Campaign Calendars the GM has linked.
• Calendar — quick view of the game's campaign calendar (the full one's under Resources).
• Recruitment — open advertisements, if the GM is recruiting; see Recruitment & Application Guide.
• Applications — your in-flight application, if you have one.

You can deep-link to a specific tab with ?tab=<name> — e.g., /games/<slug>?tab=resources.

Set your own landing page. Tired of clicking through to your group's main thread every time? On any forum, topic, or tab, click the house button (next to Follow) to make that your landing spot for the game. Next time you open it from My Games or the Dashboard, you go straight there. Click the house again to clear it and return to the game's default. It's per-game and personal to you; if the GM has set a default forum, your choice takes precedence.

The Forums tab

The Forums tab shows every forum in the game, in whatever order the GM arranged. For each forum you see:

• Name and description
• Topic and post counts
• The most recent post (who, when)
• An unread indicator if there's new content waiting for you

Click into a forum and you'll see its topics. Same idea — title, creator, post count, last post — plus a count of how many new posts have landed since you last looked. A topic's title shows in bold while it has unread posts and switches to normal font once you've read it. Next to each title is a small journals icon. You can click it to preview the topic's first and last post in a popover (switch between the two with the tabs), without opening the topic. Each preview's timestamp is a link: click it to jump straight to that post, which is particularly handy for landing on the first or last post without paging through a long topic.

Community forums at the site level work the same way, just at a different URL. See Community, Messages, and Social for site-wide navigation.

Tags

Topics can carry short tags, such as bug report, recruiting, or on hiatus. They're shown as chips under the topic title and in the forum's topic list. It's a quick way to label a thread or signal status. Click a tag to see other topics carrying it (only ones you have access to). Up to five tags per topic.

You can edit a topic's tags if you're its author, a GM of the game, or community staff: open the topic and use the + button next to the tags to add or remove them. Start typing to reuse an existing tag (autocomplete) or just type a new one — no approval needed.

Catching up: Mark All Read

If you've been away — a long weekend, a busy week, a bad case of "I'll get to it tomorrow" that lasted six tomorrows — the Mark All Read button on a game's Forums tab clears every unread flag in one shot. Use sparingly; it's hard to undo.

Downloading a thread

The download button (the ⬇ icon) in a topic's header saves the whole thread, every page, as a plain-text file. It's exactly what you can see: posts and dice rolls hidden from you (whispers you're not on, GM-only or blind rolls, and private blocks) are left out, and deleted posts are skipped. The text keeps its structure, such as paragraphs, line breaks, quoted passages (shown as > lines with who said them), and lists. It also labels any private, OOC, or spoiler asides so you can tell them apart. Handy for archiving, searching offline, or feeding a thread into something else.

Following: subscribing to specific corners

You can Follow an individual topic, a forum, or a whole game. Followed items show up in your Dashboard's "Followed Topics" widget and pipe notifications through to you based on your settings. Look for the Follow button on any topic, forum, or game page.

Starting a topic

Inside a forum, click New Topic to start one. You'll set:

• Title — what the thread is about.
• Post content — your opening post. (See The Post Editor for everything you can put in one.)
• Post type — Normal, IC, or OOC, if the forum supports those distinctions.

Posting

Quick Reply vs. Full Editor

At the bottom of every topic there's a Quick Reply box — type, click Post, done. Uses your default editor mode. Great for fast back-and-forth. It's open by default; prefer it collapsed until you need it? Turn off "open automatically" in Account Settings > Editor and it'll start collapsed, expanding when you click its header (or quote a post).

If you need more — the full toolbar, post-type controls, character selection, attachments — hit the expand button on Quick Reply (or use the dedicated New Post page). The Full Editor opens with all the controls visible.

The full breakdown of editor features lives in The Post Editor.

Post types: IC, OOC, Normal

In game forums, posts can be tagged:

• In-Character (IC) — your character speaks. Rendered with the postbit and styling your character template provides. The fictional layer.
• Out-of-Character (OOC) — you, the player, speaking. Rules questions, scheduling, meta-talk. Visually distinct so nobody confuses "I'm rolling to attack" with "my character is rolling to attack."
• Normal — no special tag. Used in community forums and any time the IC/OOC distinction doesn't apply.

You can also drop a brief OOC block inside an IC post for a quick aside ("OOC: did you mean the goblin on the left or the right?") without breaking the IC frame for the whole post.

Posting as a character

If you have a character linked to the game (see Characters, Resources, and Maps for the how), the editor's Character Selector dropdown lets you pick who's speaking. Your post then displays with that character's name, avatar, and postbit instead of your username.

This is what makes the IC layer feel like a game and not a forum.

Mentions

Type @ followed by a username and a dropdown of matching members appears. Pick one, and that person gets pinged the moment your post lands, whether they're online or offline.

A handful of group mentions work too:

• @gm — every GM and assistant GM in the game
• @players — every player in the game (excludes readers and applicants)
• @here — everyone who's looked at this topic recently
• @everyone — every member of the topic. Use this one sparingly, it can be overwhelming.

Each recipient's notification settings decide how they get pinged (in-app, push, email). Group mentions don't get past mutes: someone who's muted the topic still won't get the email, no matter how you tried to summon them.

Mentions outside of a game (in community forums, blogs, and DMs) work the same way for individual users. Group mentions, though, are game-scoped, so they simply won't resolve out there.

Quoting

Hit Quote on any post and its content flows right into your reply, already formatted with the author, a link back to the original, and the full text. From there it's just normal editor content, yours to shape however the moment calls for: trim it down to the single line you're really responding to, keep the whole thing, whatever serves your reply best.

Quick Reply quotes stay tight and simple: a single quote, no nesting, dropped neatly at the bottom of your draft. Perfect for fast back-and-forth. Full Editor quotes give you nested quoting for when you're weaving together a longer thread of replies, along with the full toolbar for anything else the post needs.

Light rules of the road:

• Try not to quote a whole post just to add a "+1." Your fellow players will skim right past it, and you'll end up burying whatever you actually wanted to say.
• Quoting an OOC block carries the OOC flag, so the meta-tone survives.
• Quoting a whisper or private block always respects the original audience. If you couldn't see it, you can't quote it, and if you could, the quoted excerpt stays visible only to that same audience.

Reacting to posts

In games where the GM has turned reactions on, the post's action row carries a reaction control using the classic Myth-Weavers orc emoji. Click the smiley add-reaction button and pick one; orcsmile (approve), orcno (disapprove), orctwitch (surprise), orctongue (playful), orcsad, or orcdance (celebrate). Your pick appears as a highlighted chip with a running count.

A few details:

• You can add several different reactions to the same post. Click a chip again to remove your reaction.
• Anyone who can read the post can react, you just need to be signed in.
• To see who reacted, open the reaction popover (the add-reaction button on desktop, or tap the stacked reactions on mobile): each emoji lists the people who used it.
• When someone reacts to your post, you get a notification (shown with the actual orc emoji). These are in-app by default; you can turn them off under Account Settings → Notifications.

Reactions are a per-game feature and are off by default. You'll only see them in games whose GM has enabled them. They also aren't available in the community forums.

Dropping live sheet values into a post

If you've linked a character sheet to the game, the editor's Sheet field button opens a picker that lets you drop live values from the sheet straight into your post. This includes current HP, AC, spell slots, or the dagger you remembered to pick up two sessions ago. Browse or search; each row shows the current value so you know what you're inserting.

When you submit, every chip bakes in its value at that moment. Later edits to the sheet won't reach back and rewrite your old narration, so your retelling of that bloody fight in the goblin warren stays true to the HP total you actually had at the time. If you want to pull fresh numbers mid-edit, the Refresh button walks the whole post and updates every chip in a single pass.

You can also set a value from right inside the picker. Type your new HP after taking a hit, press Enter, and the chip uses the updated number. The sheet write itself happens just once, on submit, so if you bail on the post the sheet stays exactly as it was.

The Post Editor guide covers the picker's mechanics in detail. This includes keyboard shortcuts, field search, and value-set syntax.

Hiding things (whispers, private blocks, spoilers)

Myth-Weavers gives you four ways to hide content in a post for your players. Pick the one that matches what you need, whether it's an allow-list or block-list:

Whispers hide the content but not the fact it happened. Other readers see "there's a whisper here" and know the conversation is happening. Private and Private-From blocks are invisible: non-recipients see no trace.

Language tags are a fifth variant with a different model. The audience is whoever speaks the language in question (a per-character setting), and non-speakers see obscured text indicating "someone's talking, but it's not in a tongue you know."

GMs always see everything, regardless of which tool you used. It's not possible to keep secrets from the GM within the game. Mechanically, all of these are buttons in the editor toolbar — see The Post Editor for the click-by-click.

Fieldsets — labeled, bordered boxes

A Fieldset is a labeled, bordered section you can drop into a post — visually setting apart a stat block, a letter prop, a journal entry, a paragraph of in-world flavor text. Not a visibility tool; just a layout one. Stack them with whispers or private blocks if the contents should also be restricted.

Rolling dice

For dice rolls — notation, visibility (everyone / GM-only / blind), the pending-and-claim flow — see Dice Rolling. The short version: roll in the topic's dice panel, the result waits in your Pending pile, and you attach it to your post when you submit. Nobody rolls after seeing the result.

Editing & revision history

You can edit your own posts after they're submitted, there's an edit button on each. Every edit is saved as a revision, so the post's full history is preserved.

When you edit, you can add an optional reason for edit ("fixed a typo", "updated for the new ruling"). The most recent reason, along with who edited and when, shows on the post itself, just below the content (e.g. Edited 2 hours ago by Aranel: fixed the spell DC). Leaving it blank just records the edit without a note.

Click History on any post to see all previous versions, who edited each one, when, and the reason given for each. You can compare any two revisions side by side; useful when "wait, did the GM change the loot list, or am I misremembering?"

GMs see everyone's edit history within their games. Community moderators see edit history across the community forums they moderate.

Posting deadlines

Posting Deadlines are the GM's gentle nudge to keep the game moving — a per-topic deadline by which everyone who hasn't posted yet should post. The countdown shows on the topic; when the clock runs out, players who didn't post show up in the GM's overdue list.

As a player

A topic with an active deadline shows a deadline widget at the top:

• Time remaining (2 days, 4 hours) or Passed if it's elapsed
• ✓ if you've already posted since the deadline was set, otherwise a reminder
• A progress bar that fills as the deadline approaches

You'll get notifications when:

• A deadline is set on a topic you're in (configurable)
• You're approaching a deadline you haven't met (default ~24 hours out, tunable)
• A deadline has passed without your post

Mute deadline notifications for a single topic from the topic header; tune them globally in Calendar and Notifications.

Unread tracking

Myth-Weavers remembers where you stopped reading in every topic. Open a topic with new posts and you'll land on the first one you haven't seen. The Unread Topics page (in the navigation) collects every topic across every game and followed forum with new posts waiting.

This is the page to open when you sit down for a session and want to know "what did I miss?"

Where to go next

Roll-up of the related guides:

• The Post Editor — the full editor reference (modes, toolbar, drafts, attachments, advanced formatting)
• Dice Rolling — the dice system end-to-end
• Characters, Resources, and Maps — linking sheets, character templates, the resource ecosystem
• Calendar, Events, and Notifications — tuning what gets pinged to where
• Game Master's Guide — for when you're the one behind the screen