The PRESTO forum is provided to help groups find information and collaborate.
It enables people to participate in multi-person discussions
in their group or across the entire PRESTO community. Using the forum is much like using email.
The main difference is that a forum makes it easy to keep track of
multiple large discussions at the same time.
Viewing and Listing Messages
Anyone can view community-wide messages in the forum. But to view
messages specific to your group, you must be logged in to your group. Group-specific messages are
shown above the gray bar, and community-wide messages below it.
The author of a community-wide message is not shown when the message is
listed or viewed. The author's name is shown for group-specific messages.
When you login, the Forum link shows the number of messages
created since your last visit to the forum. When you enter the forum, these messages are listed. To list a different set of messages, fill out the Search Results form or select a timeframe from the Once Since: dropdown menu.
To view a message in this list, click on its subject (in blue).
To view the rest of the list, click on the Next Match link until you are returned to Forum Home.
If you are the author of a message, the view-message page
will also contain buttons allowing you to edit or delete the message.
If you fill in just Date1 in the Search Results form, the same text is entered in Date2. Additionally if you omit a month from a date, it is set to January in Date1 and December in Date2. Similarly an omitted day-of-month is respectively set to 1 or the last day of the month. Thus entering 12 in Date1 and nothing in Date2 will search for all 2012 messages.
Creating Messages
To create a message, you must be logged in to your group. You may discuss anything
that does not
violate the PRESTO Terms of Use. In particular, entering offensive or other inappropriate comments is unacceptable.
Additionally there is an expectation of civility.
To create a new topic, click on a Create Topic button.
When you create a topic, you must choose the audience for it (and its replies): either the people in your group or everyone in the PRESTO community. (Group administrators can also set the To-field to PRESTO Support.
See the Help/Support page for more on this).
To reply to
a topic, click on a Create Reply button. Then if you want the message being replied to at the start your reply,
click on the Quote current message link at the top of the page.
You can enter a message using plain text or HTML.
Note that you can paste stuff from another app (say a word processor) into your message.
You can put a web link into a message by typing a full web address (e.g. http://prestogem.com/index.html) or by entering
an HTML <a> command. You can also put an image into a message, by entering an <img> HTML command.
Creating Announcements
To create an announcement, you must be an administrator of your group and logged in.
Use Create Topic as described above and set the To-field to Your Users Always.
When someone in your group visits Forum Home, all your announcements appear at the top of your group's list of posts. They are also shown when a user does a Search command — unless the Search explicitly excludes them via the For or Author field.
To stop showing an announcement, delete it like you would any other topic.
Moderator-only
A person responsible for managing a forum is called
a Moderator.
The PRESTO Team is the overall moderator of the PRESTO forum.
Additionally the webmaster of each group is a 2nd moderator for her group's section of the forum (i.e. the messages whose Share With field was set to her group).
Although we have the ultimate responsibility for Terms of Use issues throughout the forum,
we give webmasters the opportunity to deal with any issues that come up in their sections of the forum.
If you are a group's webmaster and an inappropriate message is created in your group's section of the forum, you should
click the message's Hide button and ask the author to correct the problem. If the problem is corrected, you would then unhide the message. If not and you feel it is appropriate, you can edit or delete the message.
Note that while a message hidden, only moderators and the author can view it — or see it on Forum Home, where it is indicated by a red H.
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