The most common questions I receive in emails or private messages outside of mattress related questions (which I usually answer with a request to post the question on the forum so that others can benefit from the questions and answers) are generally about registration issues, questions about searching the forum, and questions about adding attachments to a post, so I thought I would add a forum help tab that can assist with these for those who are having any difficulties (and I will add any other topics here as necessary).
This forum provides full public access to all of its content and anyone can search the forum for any information posted here but to start a new topic with questions and comments, reply to a post, or to receive the discounts or bonuses that are provided by the retailers or manufacturers that are members of the site requires registration and membership in the forum. This is to prevent spam from anonymous posters and spambots.
HOW TO REGISTER ON THE FORUM:
There is a link under the username and password window that says “create new account” and if you click this it will bring up the registration form. The fields above the Captcha are required although I don’t require real names. The username field is the one that will appear on the forum (none of the other information is visible). I would also make sure that you don’t use an email address as your username because this would make your email visible and there are many spambots that harvest publicly visible emails to add them to their spam lists. The information after the Captcha is optional and not required.
Once you have filled in the required information and successfully completed the Captcha you can scroll down to the bottom of the registration page and click “register”. When this is done the system will send you an email to the email address you registered with which includes a link which you can click or paste in to your browser to confirm your registration. Once you have confirmed your registration you will be able to log in and start new topics by clicking the “new topic” tab or the “new topic” button (in some forum views), adding the title of your topic, and typing in the content and clicking “submit”. You can also reply to any post you are reading by clicking the “reply” button.
In some cases there have been some issues with registration or with the Captcha because of restrictions or settings in a network or because of security settings in a browser (such as cookie settings which the site requires for forum sessions) in which case using a different browser or settings will almost always correct the problem. In the worst case, if all else fails and you can’t register, you can email me the username you wish to use and I can do a manual registration with a temporary password that you can change when you first log in.
SEARCHING THE SITE AND THE FORUM:
There are two search engines used on the site. The search window at the top of the page that says “search main site” searches all the pages of the site including the forum but only includes a few lines of each page or post in the results. It also allows you to search for exact phrases. The “search forum” tab at the top of the forum opens the search engine which searches the content of the forum (which contains most of the information that people are looking for when they search) but shows the complete post so you can scan all the information in every post from the search results without having to click on each one. The search forum engine includes options to use any combination of search terms you wish to look for (it searches for posts that contains all the words but not necessarily the exact phrase) and you can also search by topic title and for the posts of a particular user. The default time setting for the forum search is all the posts in the last year but if you change the “find posts from” setting to “any date” it will search all the posts on the forum no matter when they were written which will usually bring up many more hits. The results are listed 15 to a page and you can scroll down to read the full post in the results and click on the titles of the topic to read the rest of any topic. The number of pages of results is listed at the bottom of the page (15 to a page). Clicking each page number will bring up the next 15 results.
You can use a google site search which will search all of the pages of the complete site (including the forum) that google has indexed. To do this you can type site:www.themattressunderground.com then a space and then the phrase you are searching for in quotes. For example… site:www.themattressunderground “local manufacturer”… will bring up any indexed pages in the main site or the forum that includes “local manufacturer” as an exact phrase but it will also only show the first few lines of each result.
If you wish to search only through the forum postings then you can use the following formula:
site:themattressunderground.com/mattress-forum “key words”
ADDING ATTACHMENTS:
Most of the common browsers are able to add attachments to a post but there are certain restrictions. The allowed image formats are jpg, jpeg, gif, png. The maximum image file size is 2000 kb. The maximum image width and height is 800 pixels. The maximum document file size is 12300 kb. The allowed document types are txt, rtf, pdf, zip, tar .gz, tgz, tar .bz2. The maximum number of attachments in a single post is 9.
All you need to do to attach an image or document to your post is click the “add file” button to bring up the file upload window with a list of your files to choose from. Once you have chosen the attachment (image or document) you wish to add to your post then you can click “insert” to show the full-size attachment inside the post and then add any other images or documents in the same way or you can add all the attachments without clicking submit for each one which will add a link to the full-size attachment in the bottom of your post but will only show a thumbnail instead of the complete attachment inside the post itself. If you choose to insert the image or document then it will appear at the location of your cursor when you click “insert” (top, middle, bottom of your post etc.)
In some cases or with some browsers (particularly Safari) the attachment link doesn’t appear to function so you can either use a different browser or in the worst case if all else fails you can email me the attachments at the contact link on top of the page with a link to the post you wish to attach them to and I will attach them for you.