Best thing to do is click on everything and see what it does. But, here a few things i didn't know for a long time... 'Reply' (by the side of each post) quotes that one post into your new post. 'Quote' is the same as reply but you can select as many as you like, you then click the main reply button and every post you've selected will be quoted. The little orange dots next to topics are a life saver, they take you to the newest post that you haven't already read. If you don't have a yellow dot, there has been no new posts. The big cogs down the side of all the sub forums tell you that there is a post in that subforum that you haven't read (Kinda useless feature on such a busy forum) if you click it, all the yellow dots will disappear until someone posts in a topic. If you click the topic in the 'last posted info' which is shown on the main page, it will take you to the newest post that you haven't read. If you click on the number of replies next to each topic, it'll show you who's posted in there, it'll also tell you how many times. (Also, you don't need to be posting in new members just to ask new member-ish questions, ask in chit chat, you'll get a much better response.)