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blog is a collection of your personal posts. Some people use them like public diaries, others to teach messages or sermons. Or just to talk about their daily life. Blogs are likely less read than threads on this site. Blogs also have the ability to turn off comments, whereas threads do not.
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thread is the start of a topic in the public forums. Such as the Favorite Worship Song thread. So when you click on the Bible Discussion Forums link, those are all threads you're seeing.
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post is just what you say in the thread. Threads are made up of posts. So you when you see a thread and put something in it, that's a post.
If you want to reply to a specific person within a thread clicking the 'Reply With Quotes' button will bring up a reply box with their words quoted. That way, when you post your response people can see specifically who you are responding to and which of their posts you are responding to.
Tags are just keywords to help your thread show up in a search. So, for instance, if you start a thread on the Trinity you could use tags such as 'trinity, god, jesus, holy spirit, oneism', etc.. whatever other words you think apply to your topic.
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advanced button just gives you a few more options to control the formatting of your post. Most of the time they are not important. Typically they are most useful for long posts that could benefit from variations to break it up or make points stick out.
Clicking the advanced button will also take you to a preview of what you have done so far, as well as giving you the extra options. This is most handy to check your links or if you have a lot of formatting, to make sure it all came our correctly.
Going to your own profile allows you to see what recent posts you have made.
And before you ask, no, there is no option to be notified if someone responds specifically to you. There are only 'subscriptions' which will alert you when there is Any activity in the thread you subscribe to, so it may not be aimed at you at all.
Another good resource to learn how the site functions is this link...
http://christianchat.com/new-christ...-yourselves/80141-updated-help-new-users.html