Adding a link
When you write a message there is a little box that pops up with some icons, moving your mouse over the icons lets you know what they are. A camera 📷 for a photo, a smiley face 😀 for the emoji list. The list used to contain add a link but now the link button isn't there. If you want to add a link now, type in the words that you want to use a link, for instance 'click here' then select them by putting your mouse to the beginning of the first word, in this case click, holding down the left mouse key and dragging to the end of the last word (here) and a whole new menu will pop up allowing you to make words bold or change their colour and one of the items there is to add a link.
Adding a picture
When you add a picture, click on the camera icon, it will most likely open your Pictures folder for you to select your picture, once you have selected the picture you want it will appear in your message, make sure it is selected and above it somewhere will be a little menu of icons, allowing you to choose small fit or original size and allowing you to justify it to the left right or centre, you can also use the picture as a link. In the menu is a cog, clicking on this will open a side panel with settings. Here you can add a caption that will appear under your picture, and alt text. Alt text is a good idea to use because it is a description of what the picture is, if the picture doesn't load for some reason people can still see the alt text and know what the picture was of. There are also some buttons that can be toggled on or off, expand mode allows people to click on your picture and it open at a bigger size, perfect if you selected the small fit for the picture. There is a download option so people can download the image if they wish to save it and there is a spoiler alert that you might use if you were posting a picture of something to do with an ending of a film or a book or some game results that people might not wish to see yet. it will hide your image and people will need to click to open it.
Adding a gallery
In groups you get a gallery option next to the picture icon. The gallery allows you to add multiple pictures at once. Click on it, add whatever pictures you like, and all the pictures get added to your post, while they are selected you get a menu pop up above it, as with pictures you get to choose the size of the pictures but there is an option for the style of the gallery, it has grid as the default but clicking the little arrow next to it opens up quite a few other choices that might work better for the amount of pictures you are using. One of the menu choices is organise media, allowing you to change the order that the pictures are displayed and then there is the cog again. The cog opens a side panel with three tabs, media layout and settings, the settings is the same as before in pictures, expand, download and spoiler alert, media allows you to add more pictures or delete some that you added. Layout gives you further abilities to change the layout.
Share
On posted comments to the top right of them are three little dots, clicking on them opens up a menu, this menu seems to change depending on if the message is your own or someone elses' and where the message is, a different menu on the forum than in the groups. Sometimes there is a share button that allows you to share that post directly to social media other times the share button simply copies a code for you and then you can use the paste option to link to it. This code is great if you want to link to a different part of the website, if you wanted to direct people to the blog for instance, or if you had posted a swap you could announce it in the chat group and link directly to the swap post in the swaps group.
Notifications
On the blue menu bar at the top of the page, right hand side, near your own icon is a bell with a number by it, this number is the amount of new posts since you last looked. clicking on it takes you to a list of those posts and you can click on any of them to go and read them. A great way to make sure you didn't miss anything. As you read them the number will change, however occasionally it shows one as unread when you have read it, especially if you might had read it on a different device, no problem, at the top in blue it says Mark as read, simply click there and all the posts will show as read and the number will disappear off the bell. I'm not sure but I believe, the notifications will only notify you of people you are 'following'. If you click on the members tab, you have the option to follow other members that you are interested in their posts. Following me for instance will help you to not miss important announcements about the site.
The add button
If you type in more than one paragraph clicking somewhere in those paragraphs while still typing or in edit mode will show a little + symbol, clicking on it just brings up the menu that is usually at the bottom, it saves scrolling to the bottom to add a picture or emoji etc.
From time to time they change the way the site and the menu's work and they rarely tell me about it, so you might find some changes but if you play with the settings you might find all kinds of options you didn't know were there.
Useful info sarah