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Welcome to The Dark Spot Shelter. This is a temporary forum for Dark Spot members to gather and discuss the future of the Dark Spot community, and will close on December 31, 2026.  It was created to provide a stable place for such discussions, whether they might include plans start a new board, or members choosing to find other forums to call home.  Registration is required to access the General Discussion forum and share your thoughts.

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SMF User Help

Welcome to The Dark Spot Shelter, powered by Simple Machines® Forum (SMF) software!

SMF® is the elegant, effective, powerful and free forum software solution that this site is running. It allows users to communicate in discussion topics on a given subject in a clever and organized manner. Furthermore, it has a number of powerful features which end users can take advantage of. Help for many of SMF's features can be found by either clicking the question mark icon next to the relevant section or by selecting one of the links on this page. These links will take you to SMF's centrally-located documentation on the Simple Machines official site.

  • Registering - Many forums require users to register to gain full access.
  • Logging In - Once registered, users must login to access their account.
  • Profile - Each member has their own personal profile.
  • Search - Searching is an extremely helpful tool for finding information in posts and topics.
  • Posting - The whole point of a forum, posting allows users to express themselves.
  • Bulletin Board Code (BBC) - Posts can be spiced up with a little BBC.
  • Personal Messages - Users can send personal messages to each other.
  • Memberlist - The memberlist shows all the members of a forum.
  • Calendar - Users can keep track of events, holidays, and birthdays with the calendar.
  • Features - Here is a list of the most popular features in SMF.

For more information about how to use SMF, please see the Simple Machines Documentation Wiki and check out the credits to find out who has made SMF what it is today.