Welcome to the club 
Another “easier” method is here. Added a link to the wiki too.
Glad you got it working. Not sure why this happened to a few… Same image is flashed and validated with Etcher with same cards all over the place, still some got this issue on first run only which may have something to do with the expansion of the filesystem that occurs on first boot (and restarts once its done).
Probably not This comes as default with the forum application and we didn’t customise any settings. You should be ok now to post with less restrictions.