Forum Main Page Overview

Forums Main Page Overview

The primary function of the Forums main page is to provide you with access to all of your community’s forums and discussions. You will note that the center of the page contains a list of forum posts.

The Browse Discussions section at the bottom of the main Forums page lists the forum groups and the forums contained in each one.

The above example shows two forum groups: Administrators and Sample. The forums contained in each are in smaller font beneath the forum group title. You can enter a forum by clicking on the group or a forum.

You can access your community’s Forums main page by doing any of the following:

• Clicking Forums on the Control Panel from any page in the community.

• Clicking View all discussions from your home page.

The Community Server Forums main page looks like this:

Forum Post Sorting Functionality

Community Server also allows you to manipulate how forums content displays on the Forums main page. For example, you have several forums sorting options:

• Most Active – Lists in descending order the forums that have generated the most replies.
• Unanswered – Lists the forums that have not generated any replies.
• Unread – Lists the forums that have not been read.
• Your Discussions – Lists forums in which you have participated in discussions.

Shortcuts Functionality

The Shortcuts section displays in the right sidebar.

• View all users – Opens the Browse People page, from which you can search for other users in the community. Click here for additional information.
• Posts you have not read – Lists the forum posts you have not read. When you open an unread post, it is removed from this list.
• Forum Subscriptions – Opens the Forum Subscriptions page, from which you can subscribe to a forum and view the list of forums to which you have subscribed. Click here for additional information.
• Who is online – Opens Who is Online page, which displays all the users currently online. Click here for additional information.

Tags Functionality

You can also browse forums posts by tags. The Tags panel contains the list of tags used by the forum posts. The more common the tag, or the tags used with the most forum posts, display with the largest font. For example, the Blog, Blogs, CS 2.1 and CS 2007 tags are the most used in the Community Server blog posts, as shown in the tag cloud below.

When you click on an item in the tag cloud, Community Server opens a page with the list of all forum posts that use the tag. For example, if you click themes in the tag cloud, Community Server opens a page that lists all of the forum posts that use the themes tag.

The breadcrumbs just below the Control Panel remind you that you are looking at the posts that use the themes tag.

Regardless of how you sort the forum posts, Community Server shows the tags used by each post underneath the post synopsis:

Forum Posts Functionality

You can open a post by clicking on the post title.

The options you in the example above are available to all users within the community regardless of administrative privileges. The following table describes the functionality available from the forum post page:

If someone replies to the post, Community Server displays the reply below the post content so it is viewable to everyone in the community.

Note the Edit link in the reply section. You can click on it to edit the reply text and add edit notes.