HOW TO USE THESE FORUMS

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Dave Watterson
Posts: 1867
Joined: Sun Jan 28, 2007 11:11 pm
Location: Bath, England
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HOW TO USE THESE FORUMS

Post by Dave Watterson »

There are four forums:
  • Club and General Issues
    Equipment and Technical Issues
    Competitions, Festivals and The Art of Film
    Help and Advice for Newcomers

Anyone can view the forums.

To write you must register. That is a straightforward process described in detail here: http://www.theiac.org.uk/central/join_forum.html

We suggest that when you first login you tick the box beside "Log me on automatically each visit" that saves the nuisance of signing in each time you visit.

We have fairly few buttons, but most of the words on the first page are clickable links. Take a few minutes to experiment with them.

You can just click on the name of a forum and jump straight into it, but after your first visit try clicking the "View new posts" link to see what has been added since your last visit.

When you go straight to a forum there is a button near the top left marked "New topic". If you do not see an existing topic that suits what you want to say, click that button to start a fresh topic. Most of the time, however, you will click on a topic title in the list and be taken to the various posts (messages) relating to that subject. At the end of the messages you will see the "New topic" button again and one marked "post reply". To add to the existing topic use "post reply".

In the reply screen you can add colour, bold, italic and other qualities to your words. You can also scroll down to see all the previous messages in the topic. If you want to quote from what someone else has said, highlight the relevant words, hold the CTRL key and press C to copy them (On Apple machines hold the APPLE key and press C). Move back to your message, hold the CTRL key and press V to paste the words there. (On Apple machines hold the APPLE key and press V.)

To apply colour, bold etc and to mark words from somone else's message as a quote, highlight them with your mouse then click one of the buttons above the writing space. If you include a web address like http://www.theiac.org.uk highlight it and click the button marked "URL" - that will make it a clickable link.

You can click the "Save" button under the writing window at any time to store what you have written without making it viewable. This is handy if you have to break off writing to answer a phone call or to do some research. When you return to replying you will see a "Load" button which lets you bring your stored message back.

Before making your message public we suggest clicking the "Preview" button which shows you what it will look like to everyone else with all the bolds, quotes and so on. That is when we often catch silly typos in our own messages. [Sorry, we do not have a built-in spelling checker. If you are worried about your spelling, why not prepare your message on your usual word-processor, use its spell checker then copy and paste the text into the forum writing space?]

When you are ready to make the message public, click the "Submit" button.

There are other tweaks and twiddles you can learn, but these are the main ones.

Last point: at the bottom right of each forum page is a drop-down selection box marked "Jump to: ..." Click the down arrow in that box to see a list of the forums and click on the one you want to visit next.

Have fun, be polite and remember this is a public board so be slightly careful what you say!

-Dave
Michael Slowe
Posts: 803
Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2007 4:24 pm

Re: HOW TO USE THESE FORUMS

Post by Michael Slowe »

Do we have to be polite even to you Dave?
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