Mana

Mana is an optional layer on top of posting anonymously. Every visitor gets a free, throwaway user automatically -- no signup, just a signed cookie (with an IP-based fallback if you clear cookies) that lets a small amount of state (Mana balance, weight) follow you between visits. You can turn this off entirely from the settings gear in the header; it's on by default but never required to post.

This starter user is ephemeral: it's just a cookie plus your IP, not an account, and it can quietly get replaced if your cookie disappears and your IP changes too. Click Enable Mana in the header to turn it into a real, durable user (solves a quick proof-of-work + captcha) and, optionally, set a password so you can load the same user from another browser later.

Users earn Mana passively -- mainly from other posters replying to your Feels -- and gain weight the longer they stay active, which affects how much they earn. Mana is what you spend on spells.

Spells

Spells are cast from two places: the sidebar (Site spells and Rituals) and a small spell icon on each Feel itself (Post spells). There are three kinds:

• Post spells -- target one specific Feel or its poster: color a Feel's border, pin it to the top of the front page, attach a message to the bottom of it, or ping/ whisper its poster. Most of these are timed and priced by the hour -- you pick how many hours to buy, and it costs that rate × hours.
• Site spells -- change something everyone on the site sees for a while: the site's title, tagline, favicon, or background tint. Same hourly pricing as Post spells, just a lot more expensive since everyone pays attention to them.
• Rituals -- one-time purchases of a real resource: an @soupchan.org email mailbox, or access to the hidden secret board. Flat cost, no duration.

The exact costs and durations are shown on each spell's own button/menu -- they're not fixed here since they get tuned over time.

Appearance

The settings gear in the header has a theme picker — a light theme, a warm one for reading, green terminal, amber CRT, midnight, vapor and high contrast, alongside the default. Under it, Custom CSS takes any CSS you like and applies it on top. Every colour on the site comes from a handful of variables, so overriding --accent, --bg, --text and friends restyles the whole thing without touching anything else.

Both are stored in your own browser and never sent to the server, so they work whether or not you have a Mana user — and they only change how the site looks for you. Changing what everyone sees is what Site spells are for.

Replying and quoting

Every Feel shows its own number, like #1234, at the top left. Click it while a Feel is open and >>1234 drops into the reply box at the bottom. Post that, and your reply shows up as a numbered link in that Feel's own header — so you can see at a glance everything that replied to it. If a Feel collected more replies than fit on the line, arrows appear on either side to scroll through them. Hovering any of those numbers previews the post it points at without navigating anywhere.

You can also just type >>1234 yourself anywhere in a post; it becomes a link either way.

Editing

You get two minutes after posting to fix a Feel — an "edit" button appears on your own posts, with a countdown. After that it's permanent, so replies quoting your post can't have the ground moved under them. Edited posts are marked as such.

Posts from other imageboards

Paste a link to a post on another chan — 4chan, lainchan, wizardchan, autismchan, thatfeelwhen.net, and most boards running the usual chan software — and it turns into a short reference like /4chan/g/76543210. Click it and the original post opens right here in a window, rather than sending you off the site.

The post is copied here the moment you post the link, not when someone later clicks it — so it stays readable even after the source board prunes the thread, which they generally do within days. Use the Chan button on the post toolbar to wrap a link explicitly, or just paste the link on its own and it'll be picked up automatically if the board is supported.

thatfeelwhen.net has no per-post anchors, so a link there always refers to the whole thread (its opening post), not one reply inside it.

Emotes

Type a shortcode between colons and it renders as the emote: :blush: becomes , :fire: becomes , :skull: becomes . All 1967 of the standard Discord-style names work, aliases included — :laughing: and :satisfied: are the same emote, and either will find it.

The smiley button on the post toolbar opens the full list — searchable, and clicking one drops its shortcode into your post. There's no live preview in the box you type into: a text box can only hold text, so the shortcode stays as typed and turns into the emote when the post renders. That's deliberate — it means editing a post shows you the codes again rather than pictures you'd have to hunt for.

morning lads :blush: :coffee: :sunglasses: renders as: morning lads

An unknown name is left alone, so a time like 12:30:15 or a Python dict in [code] is never mangled into an emote.

Emotes are images, not letters — so they look the same for everyone regardless of what fonts your machine happens to have. The standard set is Twemoji, by Twitter and the Twemoji maintainers, used under CC-BY 4.0.

BBCode

Supported BBCode tags -- each row shows the raw syntax you type and how it renders.

if (x) { do_thing(); }

Links and images only accept http:// and https:// URLs -- anything else renders as literal text instead of becoming clickable. [code] content is shown exactly as typed, with no BBCode processed inside it.