The software that runs The Fender Forum is not your typical XForo/phpBB/vBulletin code (well, it is vBulletin, but an older version) and as such, is not always aligned with the latest web technologies. Plus, the owners of the site have made the decision to not be a media hosting site, so the options for displaying images and video require some additional work on the part of the poster. Another tutorial exists on posting photos. This tutorial is for the purposes on embedding most YouTube videos. Other "supported" media types are not included.

For purposes of this tutorial, we will be embedding a video by top studio musician Tim Pierce. When we are in Youtube, we click the "Share" button and copy the link presented to us. This link in its primary form is https://youtu.be/1RVfixJbvns?si=O8tRauUdLB4gi1ls .

In order to embed this video, we cannot use the "Insert Video" button because YouTube is an evolving technology, and the forum software needs some adjusting to make it work. Here's how. (PLEASE NOTE: Square brackets in the examples below have been replaced by curly braces. This is so the forum software doesn't attempt to render the information in the "tags" being used.

If you are familiar with HTML / Forum tags, photos are embedded within a pair of opening IMG and closing /IMG tags: {IMG}image URL here{/IMG}. The same thing is true with video content -- with a significant difference: The opening VIDEO tag must include image SOURCE information. So, the URL we have for the video example includes the source information preceding the question mark (?) in the URL. In this case, 1RVfixJbvns.

We use this information to "seed" the VIDEO tag by including a 'youtube_share' directive, a semicolon, and the source information before closing the tag with its right bracket. So, our opening VIDEO tag would be:

{VIDEO=youtube_share;1RVfixJbvns}

Then we paste in the FULL YouTube URL, and then close the entire with the ending tag, {/VIDEO}

Thus, our final forum command would be

{VIDEO=youtube_share;1RVfixJbvns}https://youtu.be/1RVfixJbvns?si=O8tRauUdLB4gi1ls{/VIDEO}

Before clicking the "Submit" button, it's always a good idea to preview the post first. Again, shifting technologies may render this invalid. Or, you may need to do some refining before it works. If all is succesful, we should now see the embedded YouTube video in our post, and we can now submit the post. DON'T FORGET TO USE THE SQUARE BRACKETS, NOT THE CURLY BRACES as done here.: