Hey guys I remembered how confused I was about how to navigate pbnation when I first joined so this is for you guys to not make the same mistake. [/size]
1. Meet your new best friend!
For many of the things you will need look towards the top of PbNation for this bar
This will help you find a lot of the things you are looking for on this site.
2. Reviews
First we'll look at the review tab. Under this tab you can find reviews on 98% of the paintball products on the market, you'll most likely be able to find what your looking for. Once you find the product you are looking for you can browse through different user reviews showing the pros and cons of each product and whether they would recommend it to you.
Reviews located here
3. Fields and stores tab
Under this tab you will be able to find and search for fields around you, or where you are going. There is an interactive map which can help you find your area and what fields and shops are near you. For most fields and stores there are user submitted reviews that should help with judging where you would like to shop or play.
4. Pursuit and locker tabs
Thread options look like this and are located in the top right hand corner of most threads.
5. Search tab
This tab allows you to navigate through the website by searching for different things such as keywords in a thread or in the title of the thread. For example typing in ego will bring up a list of threads that have the word ego in them, or it will bring up a list of threads that have ego in the title. You can also search for specific dates and forums where you want to find these posts. Another thing you can search for is usernames and it will show either posts made by this user or threads created by this user.
*There is also a search bar located in the upper right part of your screen near your username and private messages. It should look like this
6. User CP
This is the tab that is one of my personal favorites. Going to this tab allows you to view everything from your recent posts, to your private messages, and this is also where you can edit your profile from. I would go more in depth but this is something that you are going to need to explore yourself!
7. Rules and FAQ
You are really going to want to familiarize yourself with the rules tab. Before doing any posting I would recommend reading all, or at least browse through the rules and use common sense. The FAQ tab is also going to be one of your good friends throughout your pbnation experience. Under this tab you will be able to find the answers to many of the questions that you may have. As long as you look through these two forums you will be pretty well off.
The next thing that I'm going to go over is the different types of forums. Right now i'm going to give a quick overview and later on I will go more in depth.
This forum allows you to talk with other people that play the same way you do. The four main categories in this forum is the
Pump Players Discussion where pump players talk... well whatever they want related to playing pump. Everything from picture threads containing pictures of their pumps to free agent threads it's all there.
Next up is the
Recreational Player discussion. This section is for people that don't really group themselves with any of the other sections. They're mainly talking about whatever they find cool about paintball or their opinion/view on a event in the paintball community.
The
Scenario and Big Game discussion is where scenario players can discuss the upcoming and past scenarios together, compare equipment, and advertise new scenarios all over the country.
The last section is the
Tournament discussion. This section has tips and tricks about tournament paintball for newer players, and other discussions about tournament paintball.
The general discussion features wayyyy to many things for me to go through and name all of them but I will give a quick look into this discussion.
General contains everything form the latest news in paintball to the video forums where users can post their videos to show to others. This is one of the coolest sub-forums on this website and you should really look into it. General also contains a forum called young guns which is a forum where kids and there parents discuss whether they want to get into paintball and what a few tricks and tips are.
I'm going to skip some of the other forums for now to get into one of the trickier things to master on this site. The buy sell trade forum (bst for short). Many people have fears about being scammed on this site but as long as you read this you should be fine.
How not to get scammed / how to use bst
1. The absolute best tip I can give about dealing with BST is making sure that no matter if you're buying or selling you make sure that the other person isn't going to scam you. One easy way to do this is to look for the users feedback. Feedback is visible on users profiles and easy to tell if it is good or bad. The higher the green number is the better. example here
My feedback in this picture is 41/0/0 which means I have done 41 deals on this website and they have all ended well. The three different kinds of feedback are Positive (green) which as you would expect is the best. Neutral (white) which means that something went wrong with the deal or along the way they hit a bump in the deal but they worked it out. The last is negative feedback (red) which means that the deal either didn't happen and someone got scammed, or that the item wasn't in the condition that was stated in the thread where you bought it from.
2. Look for paid badges on the users profile you're buying from or selling to. When someone is willing to pay to be on this site they are most likely not going to scam you because of the fact that they would lose money to.
Examples of paid badges:
Annual Supporting Member badge. This badge shows someone paid $39.97 (something like that) to be a Annual supporting member.
BST Legit. This badge shows that a user pays about 8 bucks a month to show that their BST Legit aka for the most part they are safe to buy from or sell to.
I think that is about enough for tips on how not to get scammed, I will update this thread with something tomorrow.
I will be adding more to this thread about the different forums and how they work depending how I see people react to this thread.
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