Great question!
Once begun is half done
To start let’s look at the four main parts of the forum; the forum itself, topics, posts and replies. This is where you are now, reading my reply to your posted question in the Forum FAQ topic which is in the Guidelines forum. Clear as mud.
Buckets inside of buckets
Another way to look at this is like this:
- A forum is a bucket of relevant topics.
- Each topic is a bucket of posts.
- Each post is a bucket of replies.
- Each reply is a bucket of more replies.
Sort of like a Matryoshka doll. Not there yet? Ok, let’s try this…
The Great GRITSby
Put another way, this forum is like a library where a specific forum is a book, a topic is a chapter in that book and a post with all of its replies is the content in that chapter. (Looking at it this way you can see why it is important to keep your posts and replies relevant to the topic at hand, so that others who read that topic will not get lost.)
Speaking of getting lost…
To find your way around scroll above and you will see a string of links under the ‘Forum FAQ’ heading that look like this:
Home › Forums › Forum Guidelines › Forum FAQ
Click on any of the first three and you will be taken to those places. Scroll back down a little and you will see Author and Posts sub-headings. These are self-explanatory. But look further to the right of Posts and you will see Favorite | Subscribe (or unsubscribe) links. These will help you organize your favorite ‘books’ and ‘chapters’.
Now, scrolling back down to this reply you will see the date and time of the reply. Look to the right and you will see another string of links:
EDIT | REPLY
These will allow you to keep the discussion going as well as edit your contributions over time.
How’s that? Anyone else have a question to add to this FAQ? Hit reply above or scroll down and fill in the Reply To space below and click Submit ! 🙂