Forum Help

This forum works like many other forums. You click on the message subject heading to view the contents of the message itself. You can then choose 'Reply' to reply to the message or 'New Message' to create a new thread. There isn't a message preview function in this forum so once you submit your message it will appear with your Screen name in the forum.

A few of the special functions associated with this forum are explained below:

E-mail digest
So that you don't have to keep coming back to the site on the off chance that someone has replied to a post of yours, or something of interest to you has come up, this function allows you to have emails sent to you with relevant forum content.

Favourite Contributors In order to help you scan through postings to see which you might be interested in, we have added this feature allowing you to choose favourite contributors. You can add and remove contributors easily. All of your favourite contributors will appear in red in the forums.

Your Ratings This gives you your current and historic (over last 6 months) ratings, given to you by other forum members for your contributions.

Forum display Here you can choose whether the forum will display with threads or no threads, message previews or no previews by defaults. You can change the default settings at any time.

View Profile If you go into a specific message you will see 'view profile' next to the Screen name of the person who posted the message. By clicking this link you will get further information about that user. Please note that the user has control over what you see of their personal information so they may choose to show you a lot, or very little, information.

Below is a key explaining the icons and formatting as they appear in the forums on this site:

Message title bold	You have not read this message
Message title	You have read this message
UserID	UserID of the message contributor
UserInRed	User is one of your favourite contributors
4 June 03:01	Date the message was posted
	Average user rating of this message

Post To post a message (a 'posting') means to submit a message to the forum.

Threads You can choose whether to view the message 'threaded' or not threaded, either by clicking on the word links in the grey bar at the top of the forum or by choosing 'Forum display' in the navigation menu to the left. 'Threading' means that all messages that relate to any 'New Message' posted (i.e. are a reply somewhere along the line) are grouped together in a thread. You can tell if the messages are threaded like this as you will see the + and - icons which allow you to open and close threads much in the same way as you probably use file directory structures. If you choose the unthreaded option then messages will simply be listed in order of the date they were posted.

Message Previews We have added this function, which does not appear in most forums. With message previews turned on you can see the first line or so of the post. This allows you to quickly scan the message to see if it is of interest to you. With message previews turned off you have the advantage of being able to fit more message subject headings on the page.