IPA Region 40 Forums

Hello,
My name is William Murphy. I designed the Region 40 site, set up this forum and am now writing this guide.

I may use terms some (or all) are unfamiliar with, so feel free to ask questions.

The term "forum", like many computer terms, gets misused often. I do it myself.
Bulletin boards are often called forums, even though they are not. Bulletin boards are a collection of forums, grouped by category. Bulletin boards are a very popular way for groups of people with something in common to share ideas, information and help. Before we go any further, let's go over the chain of command. Forum visitors are classified as follows:

• Guest - An unregisted visitor
• (Registered) Member - A visitor that has registered and been approved by an administrator
• (Global) Moderator - A registered member assigned to police the forum
• Administrator - Registered members with godlike powers over the forum

I'll go over the different visitor classes soon, but before that, here are some common terms used in forums:

• Post: The act of submitting information to a forum. A member can make two kinds of post's: New Topic or Post Reply
  
  • New Topic: The first post in a thread (chain of posts).
  • Post Reply: Add a post to the end of a topic thread. Replies can be in reference to any of the previous posts in a thread.
• Thread: A collection of posts, sorted by submission date, for a given topic. The topic (subject) can be a question, announcement, tutorial (like this thead) or general information.

Guests can view all the posts in all of the topics in the public area. They cannot create new topics or post replies.
Members can create new topics, post replies and edit any of their previous posts in any of the public forums.
Moderators have all the privileges of registered members, plus they can edit or delete any post and ban problem members.
Administrators can do things that are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Guests need to either login or register if they would like to submit posts to a forum. Everyone enters the bulletin board as a guest, even registered members. Locate this line on the main page:


And click on Register to start the registration process or, if already regisered, click on Login.

Logging in only requires a user name and password:



Once logged in, registered members can submit posts or edit their previous posts. Registering requires a little more information:



Notice that the users email and password need to be entered twice. Copying the email to both fields is discouraged because the original might have typographical errors. Once the form has been completed and submitted, you still have to wait to be activated by an administator.

The public area of this bulletin board looks a little like this (and can change over time):



This is the public area category, viewable by anybody. "IPA Region 40 Public Area" is the title of the category and this example contains the forums:

• Upcoming Events
• Recent News
• General Discussion
• Chit Chat

You enter a forum by clicking on it's title. This forum only has one topic: