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Volume 4:
Internet Forums 101: Helpful hints for using the
Historic-Hillyard.com Community Forum, the Basics.
Forum.
BBS. Weblog. Blog. Message board. There are many
different kinds of online communities, of varying
degrees of ease of use and most having some central
unifying theme. In this installment of The
Hillyardite’s Guide to Computers & Stuff I will
attempt to give you a little history, and a lot of
practical application concerning online communities.
First, let’s start with defining the words above. A
Forum is, a website or web application that is
essentially an online archive of conversations, an
example is our own Community Forum:
Historic-hillyard.com. On a forum one can start
topics of conversation as well as respond to other’s
topics. Online forums are considered to be the
natural evolution of early BBS. A BBS, or bulletin
board system, was originally a computer running
somewhere that could be connected to via modem (read
pre- and non-internet) to share information,
conversation and computer files among other things.
In many ways the BBS were the precursor to the World
Wide Web. Some still refer to their online
communities as BBS even thought they are accessed
via internet and much more graphically interfaced
than the originals. A weblog, or blog for short, is
similar to a forum but it is generally run by one
person who does the majority of the posting of
information and others comment on those posts. A
message board, while not necessarily different in
layout and function from a forum is more of a
depository for information, as opposed to
conversations. In many message boards one can post,
but they cannot directly respond to a post like you
can on a forum. An example of a message board is
Craig’s
List. On Craig’s List, one can post
whatever they wish, in many different categories
from real estate to missed connections, but it is
hard to carry out conversations. Mind you these are
just a few of the plethora of types of online
communities, but we are going to focus on the Forum.
Hopefully, if you are reading this, you have spent
at least a little time in our community forum. If
not, you might want to check it out to better
understand the rest of this column as I will be
specifically addressing issues concerning our type
of forum. There are many types of forums out there,
all with similar but considerably different styles
and features as I said. Our forum has many of the
same features that the grand majority of forums out
there have. Thus, if you are pretty good at one, you
will probably be good at many. For that reason, I
suggest we try to get you good at our community
forum.
So let’s begin with a little forum vocabulary. These
are some important terms you should know that will
help not only with your forum education, but your
future forum use. These are pretty standard terms,
but I will try to point out when they are
interchangeable with other terms.
-
Thread: A string of messages (posts) in a
conversation posted to a forum or other online
community. Thread is interchangeable on our
forum with the term, “topic.”
-
Post: An individual message written by a member
that is part of a thread/topic. These are
presented in succession to form a thread.
-
Member: A person who posts to and joins an
online community. This term is interchangeable
with, “user” and “poster.”
-
Profile: The collection of information submitted
by a member/user/poster on an online community
about that member. The user profile is the face
of a user on an online community.
-
Moderator: A
person who monitors the quality of the posts on
an online community in order to create an
environment conducive to communication. More
info at
Wikipedia.
-
Signature: A member designed block of text
and/or graphics used to “sign-off” at the end of
each post. This is something entered in the
member profile and is then automatically printed
at the bottom of a member’s post, often
including name, e-mail address or other web
address. Members often include a quote or other
information they might want others to see. This
is also known as signature block or sig.
Now, these aren’t necessarily their universal
definitions, but they should serve you fine when
it comes to getting around on our and similar
forums.
Now, how about a little visual vocabulary? There
are a few important visuals to understand when
it comes to forums. I would say the 3 most
important are, the folder icon(s), the last post
icon and the reply icon. The folder icon ( )
is pretty easy on our forum, because it looks
like a folder. This icon signifies pretty much
the same thing as a folder icon does on your
computer, i.e. there is stuff being held here.
Now, the forum folder icon has a trick. When
there is new stuff here, it changes color, like
this:  .
That purple folder means this area has new
stuff, in this case new posts that you haven’t
read. Most likely the posts you haven’t read are
at the end of the thread. That is where the, “go
to last post” icon ( )
comes in handy. More on this later. The other
very important icon is the “reply” icon ( ).
You use this icon when you have something to
say. If you want to reply to the topic, you
click on it in the upper right hand corner. If
you want to reply to someone, quoting their
post, you click on it in the top line of their
post. Now you’re worried this is an awful lot to
remember. Well, that’s true, however our forum
has given us a way to cheat and not have to
remember. In our Historic-Hillyard.com forum, if
you hold your mouse pointer over any icon, these
or others, a little box will appear telling you
what that icon means/does. (Actually, that is a
good trick in a lot of places from MS Word to
web pages, if you hold your mouse pointer over a
picture on a website or an icon in Word, and
many other places a box will appear with
information for you.) However, here is a small
reference guide to some of our forums important
icons:
•
Folder Icon, Signifying a folder full of
threads, or an individual thread, with no new
posts since the last visit.
•
Folder Icon, Contains new posts since last
visit.
•
Jump to Last Post, click here to view the last
post in a thread. NOTE: In our forum this
doesn’t work if the thread is too long to fit on
one page. You have to go to the bottom of the
page and tell the forum you would like to see
page 2.
•
Reply, either to topic or with quote, this is
what you click when you have something to say.
•
Profile, click to view someone’s user
information.
•
E-mail, click to e-mail user
•
Delete post, you can use this to delete your
post or thread if no one has replied to them.
•
Edit post, if you mess up your post, use this to
go back and fix it.
•
Subscribe to topic, not covered. I don’t use it;
perhaps I’ll include it in a future volume.
Well class, that’s enough for one day. Thank you
for your attention, I hope this has been
entertaining and informative and ultimately will
help you feel more comfortable patronizing
online communities. If you have any questions
please feel free to
e-mail me
or post your question on our forum under “Front
Page Response.” Remember there are no stupid
questions.
On the next volume of the Hillyardite's Guide to
Computers and Stuff, Internet Forums 102,
advanced forum interaction.
Thanks for reading and remember, you can always
e-mail me,
Luke
Tolley, with any questions you might have
about computers and stuff and I’ll do my best to
answer them.
Resources:
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