Working with Forums

The importance of providing opportunities for discussion on important topics within your church or organization cannot be overstated. The forum module addresses this need by providing a meeting place for your community of web site users to post and maintain ongoing conversations.

Each conversation in a forum is called a thread. Depending on the level of permissions assigned to your users, they can post replies to existing threads, start new threads, and even serve as moderators to threads. Moderators have the ability to edit, delete, move or otherwise modify any thread on the forum. Moderators are essentially keepers of the peace - they enforce the rules of the forum.

The forum module is versatile enough to create multiple groups of forums. The basic interface, or ‘forum home’ view, can then be made to display an entire group of forums at the same time:



(Administrators control which group of forums appears in the above interface, by selecting the desired group from within the forum’s module settings.)



Each forum folder can be opened to display the threads within. In the first view above, the Grand Canyon Mission forum contains one thread and three posts, indicating that someone started one thread, which was followed by two responses. The last response was posted yesterday at 4:51 pm.  If we click on the Grand Canyon forum to open it, we can see the thread title(s) inside:

Now that we are inside a forum, we can take several actions. Clicking on the thread title (to the right of the blue folder icon) would allow us to see the conversation itself, post a reply, and even request to be notified by email when someone else posts a reply. Or, we can click on the 'New Thread' button near the top, and start a new discussion of our own. If we wanted to be notified when a new thread is started in this forum, we would place a check mark in the email request box, located near the bottom right corner.

Many other forum features are self-explanatory, and the benefits and usability of forums goes well beyond the scope of this brief tutorial.  But three other functions bear mentioning here. They are the My Settings, My Posts, and Search buttons located at the top of either of the views pictured above.


My Settings

Clicking the My Settings button allows you to adjust the way the forum looks and behaves when you are logged in. Here are some examples of what you'll see on the My Settings page:

In the User Profile fields (above), you can choose to enter personal information about yourself.  Note: This information will be shared with other forum users.

User Settings allow you to control the way certain forum views are laid out on your screen. For example, you can control how many threads will be displayed on a page or, when you open a thread, how many postings in that thread you will be able to see at one time. Checking the online status box will allow other users to see that  you are there.

The Tracking/Subscription settings help you stay abreast of new postings in forums that interest you. In the example above, the user has entered a checkmark in the section entitled 'Tracking Forum,' so as to be notified by email whenever a new posting occurs in the Youth Events forum. Also, because there is a checkmark in Youth Events under 'What's New Tracking,' a notification banner will scroll up the page when logged in to the Youth Events forum, alerting the user to new postings that have occurred there within the past three days.

 
My Posts

The view you'll see when you click on the My Posts button is nearly identical to the Threads view shown near the top of this page, but with one difference: instead of listing all threads within a single forum, all the threads to which you have added postings - in any forum - will be listed.  This is helpful when you need to go back and review or change a posting you added in the past.

Search

To find information from past postings quickly, use the Search button. You can set the Search tool to look for words or phrases within the text body of postings, or restrict your search to subject lines only. You can search all forums, or specific forums, and you can search within date ranges according to when you believe the information was posted.