Well, Fenian, the most recent word on the fancy stuff from our guru Max was:

DON'T

We had a run of it a while back. Max and Alan showed us a few tricks, and then we learned some on our own, and I think we got carried away to the point that it was slowing down the forum considerably. I plead guilty to being one of those who many have gotten carried away. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have been absolved, I guess....
The main purpose of the forum is to exchange ideas. The fancy stuff may be cute, but it isn't essential. A little bold or italic typeface won't hurt, I suppose, but it really isn't necessary.
However, there are a couple of things that do help in the forum, especially for posting lyrics. All HTML commands are enclosed in those angle brackets that are on the comma and period keys of your keyboard. If you want to see examples of how people had entered something, right-click on a screen here and choose "view source" from the menu that pops up. Then you'll see the HTML code as it was typed, before it has been interpreted by your browser. In addition to typing <br> at the end of a line, you can indent something by starting it off with <blockquote> and ending it with </blockquote>. The slash before a command cancels a previous command.

Another thing that's nice is clickable links, but they're kind of difficult because they have to be entered exactly. If you REALLY want to do clickable links, make sure you know what you're doing. However, if you do make a mistake on a link, there are people here who have the ability to make repairs. So, if you screw up a clickable link, you will be the object of severe disdain, but the damage you do will not be irreparable. I myself have been the object of severe disdain on more than on occasion, and I'm still here to talk about it.

Ok, so clickable links, if you really feel compelled to try them, go like this:

<a href="www.whoozit.org">http://WWW.WHOOZIT.ORG</a>

A clickable link that looks like this will appear on your screen: http://WWW.WHOOZIT.ORG
Alternately, you can choose any word or words to show on the screen:

<a href="www.whoozit.org"> Click Here</a>

What will appear on your screen is: Click Here. The link to be entered exactly, with the link enclosed in angle brackets, and the a href="link.enclosed.in. quotes.with.the.http.and.all" close angle brackets, and then the word or words that you want to be the underlined clickable word appearing on the screen, and then closed off with /a enclosed in angle brackets. Like I say, it's complicated.

Using copy-and-paste helps a lot in doing all this. For lyrics, I type them up on a word processor and save the file, and then I do a search-and-replace to replace the new line/new paragraph marks with a paragraph mark and <br>. For clickable links, I copy-and-paste the URL from my collection of bookmarks.
OK, so if you want to do it, I'd suggest that first you learn how to make new lines by using <br>. Then learn to post lyrics by copy-and-paste, with the <br> already inserted in the text you're posting. Then learn the <blockquote> command. After you feel comfortable, then you might make a very careful try at clickable links. But stay away from the fancy stuff, until the day that Max says fancy is OK again. Hope that helps........and I hope the fancy stuff I put here works.
-Joe Offer-