Can I be notified whenever a new topic appears in certain categories?

You can follow certain categories so that you get notified of all new posts in these categories. By default, all members follow the Trips and Club categories.

Navigate to the category you want to follow by going to Categories from the home screen and then clicking on the category you want to follow. Once you are in the category you can set the notifications using the dropdown in the top right:

How can I format my text with bold, italic, etc?

You can apply basic test formatting using the toolbar in the post editor. You can also mark-up text yourself using a formatting system know as Markdown. The basics are as follows.

For bold and italic, surround text with stars:

**bold**
*italic*

For headings use hashes at the beginning of the line to denote their importance:

# Big heading (best avoided)
## Subheading
### Smaller heading

You can insert a link using the following formatting:

[Link text](http://website.com)

Or using the reference style:

[Link to Google][1]
[Link to Yahoo][2]

[1]: http://google.com
[2]: http://yahoo.com

Adding a poll

If you want to create a poll, create a new topic with a title that starts with “Poll:” and inside the editor use the following markup:

[poll]
- Option 1
- Option 2
- Option 3
[/poll]

The poll will then display like this: