At the risk of sounding like a noob how do you do the symbols and colors?

No problem at all. The colours are dead easy: you use the [ color= ] and [ /color ] tags. For example, [ color=red ] This is red [ /color ] will produce This is red . The color tag supports all the standard HTML colour names; you can find them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors. It also supports the hexadecimal codes for colours, too; for example [ color=#a1b2c3 ] This is some weird color [ /color ] produces This is some weird color . Don't forget to remove the spaces; I put those in so FA wouldn't interpret them when I didn't want it to.

Characters are extended character set, and I found them on a web symbols page and cut-and-pasted them: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/mis.....s_symbols.html . That's the page that has the male, female, transgender, herm (listed as 'interlinked male and female), and so on. Ampersand codes don't seem to work on FA, but cut-and-paste from that webpage works just fine.

Grrr... correct link for web colours. I hate that FA tries to include trailing punctuation as part of a link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

Great, thanks