Guide To Making Out The Podium Position Tables

[CaroLiza_fan]

Here is my guide on how I make out the podium tables.

First of all, I have a confession. Although I use tables extensively on the forum, I have never actually made out a table within the forum, be it when we were on vBulletin or now that we are on XenForo. I have always made them out in a Word document, and then pasted them into a forum post using “What You See Is What You Get” mode.

Here is my Podium table template:

Medal	Overall​	Points​	Ladies​	Points​	Men​	Points​	Pairs​	Points​	Dance​	Points​
Gold	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​
Silver	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​
Bronze	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​	​

My advice would be to copy the above template, and paste it into a Word document.

Next go to the results page generated by the Predictions Contest software, and start copying and pasting the user names and points into the table in the Word document.

This is important. When pasting the usernames into the desired cell of the table, make sure to paste them as unformatted text. There are 2 ways of doing this:

1. Just pasting normally, and using the drop down menu on the wee clipboard icon that appears to select “Keep text only”.
   
   
2. On the Menu Bar, click “Edit”, then select “Paste Special…” from the drop down menu. In the pop-up that appears, select “Unformatted Text”, and then press the “OK” button.

The reason it has to be unformatted text is that, if you just paste normally, it will appear as a normal web link. But, we want it to be one of those special links that sends a notification to the member.

To do this, all you have to do is to put an @ in front of each username, making sure that there is no space between the @ and the username. XenForo will do the rest when you post it.

Once you have all this done, you are ready to paste the table into the thread.

Firstly, make sure you are in WYSIWYG mode. To tell if this is the case, check to see if the buttons in the toolbar at the top of the reply box are faded out. If they are, you are in normal coding mode. To get into WYSIWYG mode, find the button that looks like [ ] , and click it. Once the buttons are not faded, you are ready to go.

Then copy the filled table from the Word document into the reply box.

Unfortunately, the colours do not copy over in either normal coding mode or WYSIWYG mode. So, my advice is to use this cheat.

Press the [ ] button in the reply box to get into normal coding mode.

When you enter normal coding mode, you will notice that empty lines have appeared between each line of code. They are nothing to worry about - it is just a quirk of the system. Personally, I like to remove these extra lines. But it is not necessary to do so. Indeed, if you do any subsequent edits using WYSIWYG mode after posting, the empty lines will re-appear. So, it is kind of a pointless exercise.

Anyway, back to the instructions.

Scroll up to the top of all the coding for the table.

Replace the first 14 lines of the coding with the following:

[TABLE ]
[TR ]
[TH ][B ]Medal[/B ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][B ]Overall[/B][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][B ]Points[/B][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#CC3333 ][B ]Ladies[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#CC3333 ][B ]Points[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#3333CC ][B ]Men[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#3333CC ][B ]Points[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#33CC33 ][B ]Pairs[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#33CC33 ][B ]Points[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#FFCC00 ][B ]Dance[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[TH ][CENTER ][COLOR=#FFCC00 ][B ]Points[/B ][/COLOR ][/CENTER ][/TH ]
[/TR ]

Note: So, as to show you the coding, I had to add a space before each of the close brackets so that the commands wouldn’t work. When you paste the coding, you will need to remove all these spaces. Sorry, but it was the only way I could make it display.​

As well as the category colours, the above set of coding will also put in the blue line that separates the header row from the rest of the table.

To have “Gold” written in gold writing, find the coding line for the “Gold” cell and replace it with this (without the spaces):

[TD ][COLOR=#FFD700 ][B ]Gold[/B ][/COLOR ][/TD ]

To have “Silver” written in silver writing, find the coding line for the “Silver” cell and replace it with this (without the spaces):

[TD ][COLOR=#C0C0C0 ][B ]Silver[/B ][/COLOR ][/TD ]

To have “Bronze” written in bronze writing, find the coding line for the “Bronze” cell and replace it with this (without the spaces):

[TD ][COLOR=#CC9966 ][B ]Bronze[/B ][/COLOR ][/TD ]

I think that is all the editing that needs to be done to the table.

All that is left to do after this is to add in some accompanying writing, and you can go ahead and post.

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For your reference, here is a handy table summarising the codes for the colours:

	RGB (For Use In Word)​	HEX (For Use On The Forum)​
Ladies​	Red: 204 Green: 51 Blue: 51​	#CC3333​
Men​	Red: 51 Green: 51 Blue: 204​	#3333CC​
Pairs​	Red: 51 Green: 204 Blue: 51​	#33CC33​
Dance​	Red: 255 Green: 204 Blue: 0​	#FFCC00​
Gold​	Red: 255 Green: 215 Blue: 0​	#FFD700​
Silver​	Red: 192 Green: 192 Blue: 192​	#C0C0C0​
Bronze​	Red: 204 Green: 153 Blue: 102​	#CC9966​

• The colours for the categories are the exact same shades used in the Entries / Results pages for ISU events.
  
• The colours for the medals are the exact same shades used on Wikipedia.

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I hope these instructions have not been too complicated. If they have, I apologise. I’m not very good at explaining things.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

CaroLiza_fan