posting messages

is there a place I can go to find out about all the things we can add to a message?

How do we add a photo?
more info about touchstones?
the different number of ' ' meanings
adding book covers
etc

my posts are dull and bland (like this one with no fru fru)

There sure is!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/177029#

Try these:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/177029
https://www.librarything.com/topic/35356#n4750152
https://www.librarything.com/topic/59470#n7140295
https://www.librarything.com/topic/129158#n7183790

so most things are done in basic HTML coding?

Well, you can add emojis from your phone keyboard
😇🥳🤓

Tim also added a "spoiler" tag to the html tags to hide text that might be a spoiler. There's also a tag for creating polls but I don't remember what he called it.

And putting square brackets around a work title creates a touchstone to that work but make sure to verify that it's going to the right work and fix it if it isn't. You can also use double square brackets for author touchstones and, I believe, triple brackets for series.

Right now it's not a good idea to edit a message with touchstones. Usually it's not a problem, but they are making trouble right now.Yup, that's it. Same as bold or italics, but with the word vote instead of b or i.