Travellerspoint is a big site, which has grown many features over many years of development. I won't be able to do justice to it all (and am limited in time with writing this anyhow), but want to try to at least point out a few highlights to help you get your bearings.
As with all such endeavours, this is heavily colored by personal focus on what I know and use. You'll find different things important. Also, a lot of what I'll write will probably be obvious, but you never know when something obvious gets easily overlooked...
So, starting from the top:
In the top left there's a hamburger menu, which gives access to all public community content, such as
- Travel Forums: That's where you're at now. The main forum page shows threads from all the various subforums together, but you can click through to one of the 15 subforums in the right hand column if you're only interested in forum threads for one or two main subjects. The subforums each have one or two moderators from the community, based on their expertise in the subject of that subforum. (I'm the moderator for "Australia & New Zealand", "System Talk" and "Travel Photography".) The main forum page also has a list of threads which you've participated in (near the top of the right column), which tends to be helpful if you want to find back threads. This also shows bold with a green number of new replies if there's any replies which you haven't seen yet. If you're very active with posting and want even more of that, there's a link to the 50 threads you've most recently posted in.
- Featured Photography: All photos uploaded to the site (with a location set to at least country-level, and with "allow featuring" checked) are looked at by human moderators, and the best from them are featured to the photography section. Photos can also be tagged by subject, so this section allows exploring photos by both subject and country. The URLs for these photo galleries are deliberately made as readable as possible, and although there's no clickable way to get there, you can by editing the URL do things like finding featured castle photos from Germany - /photos/gallery/features/countries/Germany/tags/castles/.
- Blog Highlights: This is a selection of manually featured blog articles on various subjects. It's not always gotten a lot of attention over the years (less so than photos), as it's a lot of manual work to pick out the best blog posts, but for most subjects there's a very good selection of interesting blog posts.
- Community Travel Guide: A collaborative travel guide in wiki format. If you edit significant chunks of any guide articles, you're highlighted as contributor to that article in the right hand column, which can include a link back to a personal website. From the guide, you can also easily become a "Travel Helper" for a destination. This was originally only possible on country level, so lots of travel helpers there, but far fewer for specific destinations. As a travel helper, you get notified when there's forum threads specifically asking about your destinations, and random visitors can easily send you questions asking for help on that destination.
- Accommodation: What travel site can do without accommodation booking? We used to have our own in-house system, with verified reviews by travellerspoint members as a major selling point for me personally to use it, but I guess economies of scale worked against travellerspoint there. This has relatively recently moved to being a booking.com affiliate system, which I haven't had a chance to use yet. (If you were going to be booking through them anyway, a search through travellerspoint does help, as it's probably a major source of income for the site.)
When logged in to the site, In the upper right you'll see two icons:
A globe for Notifications such as private messages and responses to your threads. You can configure what all you want to be notified about.
An icon with expanding menu for all your personal content, such as:
- Your Profile: This links to your public profile (as others see it), and on there (in the upper right), you have options for editing it, including changing your password. Your profile is also the easiest way to link through to all your friends and find their profiles or easily message them.
- Your Messages: For sending private messages directly to other members, and reading what you've received so far. When there's new messages, they'll show up on the notification globe.
- Your Blogs: Lots and lots of features here; too many to name, but some highlights:
-- You can give your blogs an easy to remember subdomain based on your name or anything else. e.g. mytripname.travellerspoint.com
-- You can run multiple blogs, so you could have one for each destination you care about, or one for each trip you take. (As a new member, I think you're initially limited to a maximum of 5 separate blogs, but that limit is swiftly lifted.)
-- You can write blog entries in advance, and schedule them to be published at a specific time in the future.
-- You can style your blog entirely as you want it. There are 10 gorgeous professionaly-designed templates to choose from, but you can also write your own, or modify one of the existing ones, using CSS. (And if you don't know CSS but want some specific changes made, we're always happy to offer guidance for that here in the System Talk forum.)
-- You can have your travel map show up on your blog, either permanently in the header, or within individual blog entries.
-- You can submit your blog entries via email (if you're a paying supporter), including accompanying photos. Perfect for when you're on the road with limited internet access.
-- You can collaborate on a blog with multiple authors
-- You can save your blog as a single PDF or HTML document, for easy archiving, or to have printed as a book.
-- You can password protect your blog (if you're a paying supporter), and restrict commenting to TP members, or open it up for the entire world to see and comment on.
- Your Travel Map: One of the main really unique features of travellerspoint (though I guess it might've been copied since it was first introduced) 
, the travel map is a great way to visualize all your travels. It integrates with both the blogs and the photos here, based mostly on putting in a date for each. That means that to get this work as intended, you should add dates to your photos, your blog entries and your "stops" for each trip (or at least one departure day and one arrival day to cover the trip), and if they overlap, the map will automatically link the relevant blog entries and photos at the correct pin. There's a lot of other features here to explore as well, such as neat stats on your total distance travelled and so on (see your profile for that).
- Your Travel Planner: Where the focus of the travel map is to highlight where you've been (or where you're currently travelling), the focus of the travel planner is to help you with preparing and gathering resources before you head out. Content in the map is public, but a lot of the content in the planner is private. You can also collaborate with others for the planner. The system underlying the planner and the map is the same, so when your trip is ready, you've basically already created it on your map.
- Your Photos: I already described a lot of the features here under the Photography section, but from the photo uploader perspective, there's also:
-- Fix rotation of images after uploading, in case we got it wrong (or maybe you've always wanted to know what the Eiffel Tower looks like upside down?)
-- People can comment on your photos (and you have an interface to keep track of all comments and remove or report them if they're spammy or unwanted).
-- You can place your photos on the map through the upload interface by typing a location, or by placing them on a graphical map.
- Your Videos: This integrates with youtube and vimeo for easily allowing embedding videos into your blogs, and showing them on your profile.
- Your Control Panel: This has links to most of the above, as well as some more obscure less frequently used functionality.
- Logout: self explanatory
Finally: Our culture, as far as it pertains to the forums! We strive to be friendly and welcoming, particularly to new members. It's explicitly okay here if a question has been asked a 99 times before. If you don't feel like answering it for the hundredth time, just don't do so, and someone else will. We strongly frown upon responses in the vein of "read the FAQ, n00b!", a friendly pointer to another thread where the question has been answered is okay, but we prefer a personal response that's actually tailored to the specific circumstances of the person who asked the question.
[ Edit: Edited on 25-Jun-2024, at 08:53 by Sander ]
Have bookmarked for what will no doubt become frequent future reference.