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Entering a Conference
Ordinarily, the conference manager or Forums
administrator will provide a link you click to open a conference. What
happens when you click on such a link depends entirely on how the
manager or administrator has set up the conference. You may have to
log in, providing a username and password, or, if you don't yet have
an account, you may have to register and provide some basic
information about yourself, such as a username, password, and your
full name.
When you open the conference, you'll probably
initially see a list of forums and threads. Remember, forums are like
clusters of people talking at a party. Threads are like the
conversations they are having, each one with its own starting point.
People enter and exit threads according to their interest in reading
or participating. If you're the quiet type, you can just browse around
without any obligation to post messages.
What you'll probably do first when you enter a
conference is click on a thread that looks interesting so you can read
the messages that are inside. However, you may not see any forums or
threads at first. Instead, you may see only this message:
There are no threads updated in the last 14 days
Not to worry. You probably only need to set a few
conference options before seeing all the forums and threads that are
available to you. See
Conference Options for information about filtering the display of
messages by their age.
Logging in to a conference
When you click on a hyperlink to enter a Forums
conference, you may be prompted to log in, depending on whether the
conference requires it. Since the conference administrator can enable
a variety of security options, what you see when logging in will vary
according to how the conference is set up.
Registering yourself
The conference administrator may require you to
register prior to entering a conference. To do so you click the
Registration Form hyperlink in the login page to open the user
registration page. Once you have filled in a few details about
yourself, you enter the conference immediately, or, if the conference
administrator requires user approval, you wait until the administrator
or a conference moderator approves your registration. You’ll receive
email notification of your approval when it is granted.
User and message approval
The conference manager or administrator may require
all new user registrations to be approved before new users are allowed
to enter a conference. If this is the case for you, all you can do is
wait until you receive notice that approval has been granted.
Approval can also apply to posting messages, that is,
a message you post may require approval before it actually appears in
a forum. In either case, don't panic, you'll probably get approval
very quickly and be on your way in no time at all.
Selecting a forum
When a Forums conference first opens, you should see
all the forums you can participate in. What you see in the main
conference page, and indeed anywhere in the conference, depends on how
the administrator has customized the conference interface.
However, you may not see all the forums that are
available to you.
To show all available forums:
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Click the Options button at the top of the
conference page.
See Conference Options for detailed
information about each
option you can set.
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Click the checkbox(es) beside the forums you want to
see in the main conference page and click OK.
The forums you selected now appear in the main
conference page.
Collapsing the list of threads in a forum
In a conference that consists of many forums, each of
which consists of dozens of threads, the list of threads may be very
long. To help you see what forums are available in a conference, you
can collapse the list of threads in a forum in the main conference
page.
Collapse and expand the list of threads in a forum:
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In the main conference page, or, if you are using
the frames display, in the left frame, click the arrow button next
to the forum name.
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Forums hides the list of threads in the forum.
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Click the arrow button again to expand the list of
threads in the forum.
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