Let’s talk a little bit about the forum today, and how it works. Some of this is aimed at people new to forums, some of it is aimed at people who’ve been around them for a while.

If you aren’t logged into the forum then you’ll see the public areas, but will not see the private areas. The private areas are not some big super secret thing, all you need in order to sign up is an email address, there is no screening process. The only benefit the private areas give us is that the search engines will not pick up on the things in those rooms.

Please take a minute to look at all of the rooms available. And don’t miss out on the Geographic Areas near the bottom. I suggest you find your USCIS office room and tell the software to notify you of new topics in that room, since most people don’t look in those rooms very often. To do this, just open the room and then click on the Notify button (bar near the top, between the Mark As Read and New Topic buttons). These rooms are there for more than just discussion about the USCIS office, but for people to be able to talk about other local stuff as well. Feel free to announce FCC or other such events in the appropriate geographical room.

Please remember that the blog software and forum software are two different pieces of software. I do not have the technical ability to figure out how to get them to share a database of people, so you’ll need to sign up for each one separately. Please use the same login ID for both. This is actually a rule, not just a request, it’s pretty important. If you’ve signed up under two ID’s please let me know so I can make them the same.

Speaking of rules, please take a moment to read through the Forum Rules and the Forum FAQs.

You’ll notice that some people have a picture (avatar) under their name, and some have a signature line (showing for instance their LID date) that always posts under their posts. The avatar and sig line settings can be found in your Forum Profile Information. To get there click on Profile (buttons near the top) and then Forum Profile Information (left column links). Once there you can either choose to use an avatar from the ones available (click on each category to scroll through the pictures) or you can tell it you have your own picture (it will have to be hosted somewhere else and you then put the URL to the file into the form field). If you want text immediately below the avatar fill it in the Personal Text form field.

Look towards the bottom of this same page and you’ll see a spot for your Signature. It is nice to put your LID date in there if you are waiting, or some people list their kids and the ages of their children. Please do not make huge signatures that people have to scroll through to get to the next post. A few lines of text or a ticker should be enough. And, don’t forget to go to the bottom of the page and save your changes when you are through with the avatar and sig line settings. The software will not save your changes until you hit that Change Profile button at the bottom.

We have monthly LID rooms that you can join, but you won’t see your room until it is opened for you. I keep a thread stickied to the top of the General Discussion room for people to use to request to join their LID room. Please read through the first posts in that thread before you make your request. There are pictures of where to find your LID room, and there are some guidelines (like each person can only be in one room). Please do not PM or email the request, I do this in batches and I really need all of the requests to be all together in that room. I try to do a batch at least once a week, but sometimes things get busy and it might be just a bit longer. Please be patient.

There is also a room you can ask to join if you are pregnant and adopting. You may either ask in the thread or via PM to be in this room.

And this next detail is very important. Very. Important. When someone sends you a PM if you’ve told the software you want emails of these then you’ll get a copy of the PM in your email. There is a notice at the top to not reply to the email, that it won’t go to the sender, but many people do this anyway. If you reply to that email, it comes to me. It does not go to the sender if you reply to the email. You must go to the forum software and reply using the PM system in order to reply to the person.

The easiest way to send someone a PM is to look at the icons under their name (when they post) and click on the rightmost icon, the one that looks like this:

This will open a PM page up with their name already filled in. You can also get to your PM box from the very top of the page where it tells you how many PM’s you have and then you can type the person’s name in.

I get a lot of people PM’ing me that their email address shows up, or that they can see their own IP address. If you’ve told the software not to show your email address to others, then it won’t (exception being some of the staff). You have this show or don’t show option in your Account Related Settings in your profile. The software works by permissions, and you always have permission to see your own email address and IP address. But other members can never see your IP address, and can only see your email address if you’ve told the software to show your email address to everyone.

If you see a post that you think moderators need to be alerted to, please use the Report to moderator link in the lower right hand corner of the post. This goes to all moderators at the same time and means the post can be responded to much quicker than if you send it to someone who may not be online at the moment. The list at the bottom of the page shows people online in the last 20 minutes, it does not mean they are online right at that moment.

A few shortcuts for moving around the forum:

• There are two links at the very top of the forum under your PM numbers. The Show unread posts since last visit link is handy for people who want to read everything, no matter which room it is in. This keeps you from having to go from room to room to room. The Show new replies to your posts is there if you just want to see topics that you’ve posted on that have been replied to.
• When you reach the bottom of a page there is a Jump To link. The room you are in is listed, if you want to go back to that index page then click the Go button to the right of it. If you want to go to a different room then click the room name and it will expand, click the room you want to go to (you can scroll if you don’t see it) and when you click on the room name it will take you there.

Lots of people have trouble using the quote feature. The forum software sees codes as being between these brackets [ ]. To turn the code on you use a code word or code letter between these brackets, and then to turn it off you use the same thing but with a forward slash before the code word or letter. So, to make a word bold you use a [b] and then to turn off bolding you use a [/b]. The quote feature works the same way, to start the quote you use [quote] and to turn it off you use [/quote]. The software will do this for you in two ways:

• To quote someone’s post, instead if hitting reply hit the Quote button (upper right corner of their post). Your reply box will then have their post inside of the two quote codes. The first quote code will look a little different, it will be [quote=link to post], but it’s still an opening quote code and that’s fine. If you want to just quote part of what they said and not the while thing (which is usually recommended if you are responding to only one part of a longer post) then remove the parts of their post you don’t want to show, but make sure you leave the opening and closing quote codes. Then move the cursor after the closing quote code, hit enter a few times, and then type in your response.
• To show something as a quote that comes from somewhere else, type it up (or paste it in), highlight it, and then hit the Quote Button in the toolbar (looks like a cartoon bubble) and it will put the opening and closing quotes at the beginning and end of what you highlighted.

Don’t forget, you can always preview your post before posting it to make sure you got it right. Once you hit Preview you’ll need to scroll up a bit to see what it will look like. If you like it then don’t forget to scroll back down and hit post.

That’s all I can think of right now. If you have any other questions about how the forum works please ask.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 10:22 am and is filed under Administravia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.