Help with the Forum

1) Forum View: When you go to the Members' Forum you will see the main category of the forum.  Inside the main category are threads. Threads are discussion topics to which you may reply with your own posting. To start a brand new topic, click on the green "New Thread" icon. Be careful about starting too many new threads. Before doing so, it is best to browse existing threads to see if a topic has already been addressed. If so, it is better to reply to an existing thread.

2) Thread View: When you click on a thread you will see a selection of buttons above and below each posting and response (see below).

Some of these buttons have very limited uses; others get used quite a lot.

Here is a summary of the buttons:
New Thread: Starts a new topic to which users can reply
Reply Topic: Reply to the currently opened thread.
Reply: Reply to the current thread or to an individual reply.
Quote: Start a new post and paste the current message into the new message as a quote.
Subscribe: Receive an e-mail whenever a new post is made in this thread.

3) Write a posting: When a user clicks on the "Reply Topic" or "Reply" button it opens the write posting screen.

The Name and e-mail fields will be pre-filled. The subject is pre-filled if replying to an existing thread. When creating a new thread the Subject field must be filled in. The topic icon defaults to none, but users may select one of the icons in this row to appear next to their thread or reply.

Boardcode allows users to insert formatting into their posting--bold, italic, underline, quote, ordered and unordered lists, linked URLs and so on. Clicking on a Boardcode icon inserts a set of tags in the message box. If you mouse over one of the boardcode icons you will get a little help message just below the icon showing how to use the tags, with an example. It is best to keep formatting to a minimum, although it is not hard to use these tags once you get the hang of it.
Message text goes in the Message box. Try to keep messages as brief as possible.

Select file to attach allows users to attach a PDF, Word, or Excel document to their posting. Click on the "Browse" button and navigate to the file on your local computer. The file will show up as a link at the bottom of the posting. If you want to put a link to the file in the message body, click on the "[file]" button.

The "Submit" button posts the message to the forum.
The "preview" button gives a preview of what the message will look like just below the message box.
"Cancel" does just what it says, erasing the message text and returning to thread view.

4) Check the forum frequently for replies and new threads.