SBC: A Complete Guide for Beginners

Hello everybody! I'm tvguy347, and you may remember me from such helpful guides as "When Ants Attack" and "My Janitor is Bald!"

Okay, I'll get on with the guide.
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When you first get onto SBC, you either enter into the Portal:

Or the Forum Index:

(Sorry for the edges being cut off)
The portal is a place to see all the updates and news around SBC. It displays some widgets, such as the latests polls, latest posts and topics, top posters, some news, and the featured topic. The Index is where everything happens. You're initially presented with the navigation bar:

Four significant buttons that you'll find yourself using often are the Messages, Xat, Profile, and Spin Offs. The Home Button doesn't count, as you use it constantly. Using the Messages button (it's the envelope icon) you can check your inbox and see if you've received any new PMs (private messages) since you're latest visit. If you get a new PM, the envelope will open and it will say "New PM" on the bottom. The Xat is the official SBC chat and can also be accessed through the Portal. Profile is where you can change all your info. In the profile, you can elegantly change info. All profile subjects are efficiently displayed through tabs. Finally, if you hang out around the Spin Offs forum, you can click this button for easy access to the spin off forum.

Further down, you'll see widgets:

Widgets show you news around the forum, bundled nicely into the side of the forum. You can also search the forum from the Widget Sidebar.

At the very bottom of the forum index is the "Who's Online?" module. This tells you everything about our post count, the current members online, and the group legend.

Also by "Who's Online?" are the top posters, overall top posters, and the active topics of that day:

The forums are pretty self explanatory. But Spin Offs may be hard for beginners to understand.

Basically, spin offs are created by the users following a very loose SB character or storyline. It doesn't have to revolve around SB at all, but take place in Bikini Bottom. Spin Offs can be written in three forms:
Dialogue/Detailed Form:

Script Form:

Summary Form:


Hope you enjoy SBC!

Excellent guide, tvguy.

Wow, I could definitly tell that you put alot of effort into this. Great job, Tvguy.

I'm sure it'll be very helpful for new users.

Nice job, tvguy!

Simply awesome. I see my name in one of the images.. YAYAYAYAY!!!!

Way to go Guy of TV !