In this thread you post Ascii Art while testing it to make sure things line up correctly, so that you can post it correctly in the thread you want without making that particular thread suck.

★　Always sage when posting!
☆　You can post as many times as you need/want to, don't be shy!
★　Asking for Ascii Art help in this thread is A-OKAY ＼（´ｰ｀）ノ
☆ 　This thread will be purged of all practice-posts every few days. Discussion posts such as asking for help will NOT be deleted as they could be used as refererence for others.
★　The fun with Ascii Art is to experiment! Similar to a photoshop thread on an imageboard, a fun pastime when playing with AA is to take someone's already-existing AA and edit it! You can use this thread for those purposes as well.
☆　If you're out of AA ideas, browse 2ch for a bit -- you're bound to find something interesting there.

If you have Microsoft IME installed, you can call up symbols easily by typing a keyword like one of the following, and then pressing SPACE. To do so, you must be in hiragana mode.

きごう 【ｋｉｇｏｕ】 gives you a huge list of things, including ∀ and ♪ and ★ and ◎ as well as many of the symbols found below
ほし 【ｈｏｓｈｉ】 gives you stars ★☆※＊
ひし　【ｈｉｓｈｉ】 gives you diamonds ◇◆
ろしあ 【ｒｏｓｈｉａ】 gives you Cyrillic
さんかく 【ｓａｎｋａｋｕ】 gives you triangles △▽▲▼∵∴
てん 【ｔｅｎ】 gives you dots and periods and stuff ・‥
けいせん 【ｋｅｉｓｅｎ】 gives you boxdrawing things ┤┫┰
ぎりしゃ 【ｇｉｒｉｓｈａ】 gives you Greek Letters εΩξ
Typing [ or (　gives you all sorts of brackets

Alternatively, you can always call up charmap at the command line (Start → Run → type charmap)

 　 ∧＿∧　　　∧＿∧　　　∧＿∧　　 ∧＿∧　 　 　　∧＿∧
　（　・∀・） 　 （　｀ー´）　　（　´∀｀）　 （　ﾟ ∀ﾟ ）　　　 （　＾∀＾）
　（　　　　つ┳∪━━∪━∪━━∪━∪━∪━┳⊂　 　 　つ
　｜ ｜　|　 ┃       Have fun with Ascii Art!        ┃　｜ ｜ ｜
　（_＿）＿） ┻━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻　（_＿）＿）　　　　　Thank you.