Final Fantasy Fourteen Forum Features, Fun & FAQ

Greetings!

These official Final Fantasy XIV forums have a handful of features and quirks that aren't immediately obvious even to seasoned forum users. In this thread, I'll go over some of the most common gotchas and tricks to help you make the most of your lurking & kvetching.

Note that a lot of what I talk about only applies to the full version of the forums. The mobile version has its own set of quirks, and I switched my Android to the full version long, long ago, so I can't remember many of them. If mobile users want to list some stuff, I'll happily add it. Also of note, if you switch off of the mobile version, there's no way to switch back that I know of.

Why can't I post?!?!? (Posting restrictions)
If you've come across the error "New forum post cannot be made due to either you have reached to your daily limit or your main character's level is not high enough," your explanation is here. Or at least the start of your explanation. What's not detailed in that post:
You have to register your main character via Settings > Edit Character. The forum uses the level of the first of three classes on the character you choose to determine your restrictions, so make sure you set your highest level as the first class.

While posts in New Player Help, Bug Reports, and Technical Support aren't restricted, they do count against your daily limits. If you're limited to one new thread a day, and you make any threads in New Player Help, for example, you won't be able to create your one thread in another forum until 24 hours have passed.

The timer seems to be a rolling 24 hours from your most recent posts. There's no specific daily reset time. If you're limited to five posts a day, you can post again 24 hours after the first of your five most recent posts. For example, if you post at 10 AM, 11 AM, 12 PM, 1 PM, and 2 PM, you'll "earn back" one post at each of those times the following day, so you'll be able to post one time at 10 AM the next day, one more at 11 AM, and so on.

1000 Characters? But look at this huge post I'm reading right now!
The 1000 character limit only applies when you first post a post. You can edit a post and put in as much as you want. So get into the habit of writing your post, copying the entire contents, cutting it down to less than 1000 characters, posting, then immediately editing and pasting the whole thing back in. If you finish your edit in under a minute, it doesn't even show up as being edited (unless you supply an edit reason).

10 Posts Per Page? What is this, a forum for ants?
Everyone should go to Settings > General Settings. There's good stuff in there. Especially for those of you at work who may want to hide images and/or signatures (you still get links to the images so you can choose to see them, and you can view sigs in a user's profile if you get curious).

Subscriptions & Tracking Threads
By default, you're subscribed to any thread you post in. There's a checkbox to turn this off if you go to the advanced posting screen, but any Quick Reply or Reply With Quote will give you a subscription. While browsing the forums, any thread you're subscribed to will have a small green checkmark icon (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/i...subscribed.png) to the right of the thread name.

You can see your subscriptions in Settings, where you can also unsubscribe from any threads you don't actually want to follow, and Edit Folders to create folders for threads you do want to keep around.

You can manually subscribe to any thread without posting to it with the Thread Tools > Subscribe to this Thread... item at the top right of the thread. When you use this, you'll be asked which folder to keep the subscription in. It's a convenient way to keep a set of links to useful threads. I keep a folder for FAQs & guides, a folder for threads that only get occasional updates that I want to watch (Reinheart's translations, for example), etc.

Tags
Users can add up to 5 tags to any thread. While you're browsing the forums, any thread with tags will have a small tag icon (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/images/misc/tag.png) to the right of the thread title. Hovering over that icon will show you some of the thread's tags.

At the bottom of the page for a thread (under the Quick Reply box) is the tag cloud for it, and hovering over any existing tags will tell you what user added that tag. You can also add or edit your own tags.

This feature is a bit hit or miss. Often, the tags people add are just for amusement purposes. Some tags can be useful for finding information with Advanced Search, but it's not terribly reliable.

Dev Tracker
There are a lot of ways to find information posted by the developers or community team. I'll go over some more detailed searches in the search section below, but here are a few basics, first.
Any thread with a crown icon has a post by a community team member or developer in it.

The Forum Top page features an abbreviated Dev Tracker on the right side, with the most recent dev posts.

On that top page, each language's forums have a link to their language-specific dev tracker. For example, the English Dev Tracker is at the top right of the English forum block.

At the top of every single page on the forums is a link to the all-language Dev Tracker.

Quick Search Sucks
Unless you're looking for something very specific, the quick search box at the top right of the forums is probably not your best bet. Here are some tips for actually finding what you're looking for.
Every individual forum has a Search This Forum drop-down at the top right. Every individual Thread has a Search This Thread drop-down, too. Search This Forum allows you to have your results returned with just the threads that contain your search (Show Threads) or a snippet of the actual posts themselves (Show Posts). Both drop-downs also have a link for an Advanced Search of just that forum or thread.

Advanced Search lets you narrow things down a good deal more. You can limit your search to just thread titles or entire post contents, specify a time limit, add a specific user name, etc.

Advanced Search also includes a Dev Tracker checkbox. This is how you find Dev posts on a specific subject. If you know the post is in a particular forum or forum section, you can do an Advanced search with Dev Tracker of just that forum or section. It's also how you find just the dev posts in a gigantic thread like Some suggestions, mostly quality of life, obvious things (or any thread where you only care what the Devs have said). Open the thread, click on Search This Thread > Advanced Search, check the Dev Tracker checkbox and hit Search.

What are these medals for?
The number of medals each user has, and whether they're gold or silver, is based on the number of posts they've made, the number of likes they've received, and the number of likes they've given. I'm not aware of anyone knowing just how any of that is calculated. We can easily see how many posts someone has, but seeing how many likes they have would involve looking at every single post they've made and adding them up. And how many likes someone has given is not visible at all.

Post numbers and linking specific posts
Within every thread, each post gets numbered starting from 1. For example, this post right here is post #1, the post below it is #2, etc. You can see these numbers in the top right of each post. And those numbers are also links that you can copy, bookmark, etc. This is a good way to get someone to a specific post in a thread. For example, here's a link to post #31 in a thread. I could just link to the thread itself and tell people what post number to look for, or what page it's on, but what page it's on depends on your forum settings, and if I already know that stuff, copying the link to the specific post is probably just about as easy as copying the link to the thread. Nudge nudge.

Quotes and quoting

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bixby

When someone's been quoted (correctly), there is a small blue icon with two arrows pointing right next to the tagline at the top of the quote. Clicking this icon will take you to the post where the quote originated.

If you'd like to quote someone yourself, and have it show up like this, with the username and avatar and that handy icon link, click the Reply With Quote link at the bottom right of the post in question. Note that quotes count toward your 1000 character limit on fresh posts, so be prepared to do the usual copy cut post edit paste.

If you'd like to quote multiple posts, that's what the little quote chat bubble with a plus sign (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/i...iquote_40b.png) in the bottom right of each post is for. Click that for each post you want to quote, then click Reply With Quote on any of those posts. You'll get a quote box in the quick reply box for each post on which you'd clicked the plus sign.

You can also use this to post quotes from one thread into another. Click Reply With Quote, copy the text you get in the edit box, take it to the other thread, and paste it into a reply there.

Quote:

Note that if you want to quote something that isn't a post, or just make something stand out, you can wrap it in quote tags like this.

Also note that nested quotes will not show up when you're quoting a post that contains quotes (unless you're clever and do a lot of copying and pasting and stuff).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bixby

Speaking of quotes, here's how you can quote a locked thread with these fancy linkable quote blocks.

Normally, when a thread is locked, either the Reply With Quote link doesn't appear at all or, if it's there, returns an error when it's clicked. With a little work, though, you can quote them anyway. For the examples below, I'll use ( ) to represent the [ ] you'd put in the actual forum code to make this work.

Let's say I want to quote Bayohne from this thread. I open that thread in another tab, then start with a blank quote block, and paste the text I want to quote inside it:

(QUOTE)A2: *The stream shows off gameplay of Glamours.(/QUOTE)

Next, I add Bayohne's name to the quote tag:

(QUOTE=Bayohne)A2: *The stream shows off gameplay of Glamours.(/QUOTE)

Finally, I copy the link to the particular post I'm quoting and add the ID # to the end of the quote tag, after Bayohne's name and a semicolon. This link is in the upper right of the post, as mentioned in the "Post numbers and linking specific posts" section above . When you copy a link from the post #, the post ID is the last number given. Here's the URL I copied from post #3 in that thread, with the post ID in bold:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/154038-Letter-from-the-Producer-LIVE-Part-XIII-Q-A-Updates?p=1963132&viewfull=1#post1963132

So I add that to my quote tag:

(QUOTE=Bayohne;1963132)A2: *The stream shows off gameplay of Glamours.(/QUOTE)

And now I get a nice, slick, linkable quote like below.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bayohne

A2: *The stream shows off gameplay of Glamours.

Other tags and the advanced editor
Whether you're editing a post, replying, replying with quote, or multiquoting, you should see a button that says "Go Advanced." This will take you to the advanced post editor, which has several more features. You can give your post an icon (I'm giving this one the little blue page icon), and make use of several tags for formatting. In the upper right of the advanced editor, there are also buttons with double arrows pointing up and down. These are for increasing or decreasing the size of the editor's text box itself, which is really handy when you're editing an enormous post like this.

Here are some of the other tags in action:

Code:

Code tag Handy for keeping text formatted with exact spacing.

HTML Code:

HTML tag. For, y'know, <html></html>

PHP Code:

PHP tag. <? whatever(); i_dont_know_php(); ?>

HB tag. I assume this stands for "Hide Button."

~~S tag, for strikethrough~~
Font size 1, Font size 2, Font size 3, Font size 4.

Center
Right

It's worth noting that if you're wondering how someone's done something with a post, you can just Reply With Quote, and you'll be able to see all the tags that went into making their post. Except, unfortunately, for nested quotes. Those get stripped out.

When you're in advanced mode, you'll also see a button for Preview Changes that will let you see what your post will sort of look like before you post it. It's not entirely reliable, though. Quotes get mangled visually, and HB tags don't really work. I'm not sure of all the limitations, but just be aware that Preview isn't perfect, and you may have to post and edit a few times to get things really looking the way you want them to.

I'll be adding more to this as I find it, or as other people point it out to me. Cheers!

Can we get this stickied please?

Thanks Bixby very helpful post!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bixby

1. The timer seems to be a rolling 24 hours from your most recent posts. There's no specific daily reset time. If you're limited to five posts a day, you can post again 24 hours after your 5th-most-recent post. Ish. YMMV.

2. Quick Search Sucks

Very informative post - thanks for the time putting it together - I see those questions asked almost daily. Comment to above:
1. I believe it's actually 24 hours since the first post of those 5 / amount of your limit.
2. What actually "sucks" is all of us by not using correct (or mainly not at all) the tags feature which is the main source for the search.

Quote:

Originally Posted by HEC

Very informative post - thanks for the time putting it together - I see those questions asked almost daily. Comment to above:
1. I believe it's actually 24 hours since the first post of those 5 / amount of your limit.
2. What actually "sucks" is all of us by not using correct (or mainly not at all) the tags feature which is the main source for the search.

1. Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. Just wording troubles. I'll reword and give an example.
2. You sure it searches for tags? If I do a quick search for "badpaldinisbad" it doesn't find this thread, which has that tag (this is just the first thread I could find with a unique tag that isn't just a word that's already somewhere in the thread).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bixby

2. You sure it searches for tags? If I do a quick search for "badpaldinisbad" it doesn't find this thread, which has that tag (this is just the first thread I could find with a unique tag that isn't just a word that's already somewhere in the thread).

You're right - it seems that quick search finds THIS thread while you need to use advanced search and put the expression in the "tag" box to actually find the thread you've linked. So during my few "experiments" with the search before I've abandoned the feature as totally uselles I've must have been "lucky" to have the same expression in the tag and thread itself. Either way - the search is Poo but I still believe that putting the (relevant) tangs might increase the chance of the thread beinng found. Which reminds me that I've totally forgot to tag the bunch of the new threads I've created in the Bug reports - off I go to fix that.

Bixby is and has been the biggest help on this forum to me since the first day I've ever posted. Just throwing that out there.

This should go back to the top.

+1 for this to become a sticky. ^_^

bump this up thank you for putting this together