Forum Guide

Contents:

Registration is relatively easy. For persons new to Forums, here are some guidelines:

• Click the small 'Register' link button in the blue bar under the header of any page;

• Complete the form by filling in all required details;

• You may choose to use your own name or a nickname as a username and choose a password that you will remember;

• Make sure that the e-mail address you give is correct;

• After completing all the questions, click the 'Submit' button at the bottom of the registration form;

• An automatic e-mail will be sent to you with your log-in details; you should receive this e-mail within seconds. This e-mail tells you that a moderator will manually activate your account.

• You’ll receive another email once this has been done and then you can log in. You will now be able to take part in the forum.

The registration process sounds tedious and difficult, but it's really not the case.

Log in: Every time you enter the forum, you have to log in with your username and password before you can 'post' questions, queries and replies;

Posting: There are two primary ways to create a post:

To start a new topic: If you want to start a new discussion topic, make sure this topic doesn't exist elsewhere in the forum. In each Forum, you may click 'New Topic'. This will take you to the posting form, and, when you have posted, will create a new topic with your post as the first one in the thread. Please refrain from posting new topics when a reply will do under an existing topic. Too many similar topics will only cause confusion!

To reply to someone's post: Click on the post you want to reply to, then click 'PostReply'. This will take you to the posting form, and, when you have posted, it will add your post to the topic you replied to. To reply to a specific post, you may also click the 'Quote' button in the upper right corner of that post – this copies the text of the post you’re replying to into your post.

Signature: You may add a signature to your post. To do this, check the box next to Attach Signature. You may change your signature by editing your profile in the User Control Panel. To do this: while being logged in, click the "Profile" button on the top menu bar, change your details and click 'Submit' on the bottom of the form.

Reply Notification: When you post, you may be interested in knowing when that topic is replied to. If so, you may check 'Subscribe Topic' radio button at the bottom of the page.

Smilies or Emoticons: Smilies are small images that appear in posts. Usually they are small images of faces, and are often used to show emotion. The posting form contains many smilies to choose from. Enjoy!

Editing Posts: Editing posts allows you to go back and fix errors, remove incorrect information, or add new information to your posts. To edit a post, look at the top right corner of your post and click 'Edit'. You will be taken to the posting form to edit your post, and then click Submit to enter it into the database. If you edit a post after it has been replied to, a small message will appear at the bottom of it indicating how many times it has been edited, and when and by whom the last edit occurred.

Moving Posts: To move your post, if you accidentally posted it as a new topic instead of a reply, just copy the contents of your original post, create a 'Reply' under the correct topic and paste it as a reply. Click 'Submit'. Then go back to your original post, click 'Delete', and then click 'Submit'.

Deleting Posts: Click 'edit' and then check 'delete this post'. Click 'submit' to finish deleting the post. You may not delete a post if it has been replied to (i.e. is not the last post in the thread).

Private messages allow users on a board to contact each other out of the public eye. The forum has its own private messaging system where each user has his own inbox, outbox, sent box and saved box facilities.

Sending: There are three primary ways to send a private message ('PM'). First, you may go your private messaging centre and click 'New Post'. Secondly, you may click 'Post Reply' from a private message you are reading. Finally, you may click the PM-link on any user's profile or post.

Receiving: There are three ways that you may be notified of a private message.

Most obvious is the 'private message' link at the top of every page. It will display, 'You have X new message(s)'. You may click this link to take you to your Inbox.

You may be informed of new PM's by an e-mail sent to the e-mail address your username is registered to. You may also be informed of a new PM by means of a small window that pops up while you are viewing the board. E-mail and pop-up notification will contain a link to your Inbox. Sometimes you may be informed of a new PM, but when you go to your Inbox, there is no new message. This is not a bug; it simply means that the sender must have deleted the PM before you read it.

Navigating through posts in this Forum is based on the idea of *posts,*threads and *forums. Generally, a user will start at the Board Index (index.php). The Forum Index shows a list of forums. If you click on one of the forums, you will be shown the View Forum page, which is a listing of the topics in the forum. By default they are sorted in chronological order by the most recent post in each thread. If you click on a thread, you will be shown the View Topic page, which is a listing of the posts in that thread. The posts in a thread are organised chronologically, with the oldest post first.

Post - A post is a piece of information submitted by a single user. It may be a new post, which starts a new topic, or a reply to an existing post. Posts are typically a sentence, paragraph, or a few paragraphs.

Thread - A thread is a collection of posts. The posts are organised in chronological order. The idea of a thread is that there is a single post that contains the thread of discussion. The rest of the posts in the thread are replies to this first post and to other replies. Threads are sort of like conversations, allowing many people to state their opinions about an idea, or debate an issue.