Quick Guide for Navigating the Community Forum

[Lau_EA_Aus]

Quick Guide for Navigating the Community Forum

Welcome to the Emerge Australia ME/CFS Community Forum, this thread is designed as a quick reference for you to find certain functions that are available, how to use the Community Forum effectively and troubleshooting answers that you may need.

Contents:

• Getting Started – How to begin connecting with people in the ME/CFS Community
• How to find most recent / active posts
• How to read posts in correct order and reply to certain posts in a thread
• How to flag a post – if you see something that shouldn’t be on the Community Forum
• How to share to Twitter and Facebook
• How to follow certain posts and get notifications
• How to clear all notifications – mark them all as ‘read’
• How to setup a signature and profile picture
• How to change your username
• Member reputation and upvoting posts - Explained
• How to contact a moderator
• Forum tips and tricks

1. Getting Started:

When you’re new to the forum you may not know what to do or where to go to connect or chat with people in the community. To help with this we have the ‘Start here’ function which will take you to a public space in the community where you can join an online social group and start connecting with people who understand what it is to live with ME/CFS or Friends, Family and Carers.

If you are looking to start connecting with people in the community, Click here. This page is the perfect place to start, and you can choose which forum space is best suited to you.

2. How to find most recent / active posts

As this forum is used by many people in the community, you may find it hard going to each induvial category to see if anything new has been posted. Or you want to try and find active community members who are currently chatting in a certain post. The ‘Recent’ feature in the Community Forum is perfect for this.

To learn how to navigate straight to recent posts, Click Here

3. How to read posts in correct order and reply to certain posts in a thread

Depending on what device you are using to access the forum, you may find that the posts are displayed incorrectly, or not to your liking. You can easily fix this by the “Sort By” function available. Also, to help the community know when you are replying to certain parts of the thread, there is a “Quote” function that is perfect for this.

To learn how to sort posts and use quote function, Click Here

4. How to follow certain posts and get notifications

As there is a lot of different threads and posts on the Community Forum, some users like to set up the “Watching” function we have and get notifications of when certain topics/threads are being updated. These functions are a good way to stay in touch with the community and stops users having to keep logging in to check threads and see if anyone has replied – When you have notifications turned on, the bell in the top right-hand corner will alert you

To learn how to set up “Watching” function and get notifications, Click Here

5. How to flag a post

From time to time on the Community Forum you might read something that has been posted from a member that is breaking the Community Forum rules or values. If this occurs, we ask the community to flag this for a moderator so the are alerted to the post and can decide what action needs to be taken

To learn how to flag a post, Click Here

6. How to share to Twitter and Facebook

We welcome our community to share information about ME/CFS on their social media, and have created a function to make this easy for them (please only share open parts of the forum, don’t share anything in closed groups or non-public discussion area’s)

To Learn how to share on Twitter and Facebook, Click Here

7. How to clear all notifications

Depending on how many threads you are “Watching” or how many notifications you have set up, there may come a time when your alerts become quite high. If you don’t want to go through each individual alert, but want to clear them all, there is an easy way to do this.

To learn how to clear notifications, Click Here

8. How to setup a signature and profile picture

As the ME/CFS community is warm and friendly, why not personalise your profile and posts with either a signature or creating yourself a profile picture (this doesn’t have to be a picture of yourself, if you don’t want it to be, it can be a picture of anything you like). These can be changed anytime and as much as you like.

To learn how to create a post signature or setup a profile picture, Click Here

9. How to change your username

From time to time when creating your profile you may make a spelling error, or maybe you just want a new username. While this function isn’t something the community can do in their profiles themselves, it is something that can easily be changed by a moderator. Just simply post in the “Changing username” thread with what you would like your new username to be, and someone will do it for you… Easy!

To go to “Changing username” thread to request a change, Click here

10. Member reputation and upvoting posts

Member reputation is often misunderstood and just because someone doesn’t have a lot of ‘upvotes’ doesn’t mean they are any less valuable to the ME/CFS community. While ‘upvoting’ is designed for members to use when they read posts that they like or come across something that you think other community members might find helpful, there are other functions that member reputation is used for also.

To find out more about member reputation and upvoting, Click Here

11. How to contact a moderator

There may come times when you want to contact a moderator to ask a question or seek assistance, but don’t want it to be public. You can do this with a ‘chat’ function in the forum. As we have a few moderators you can either open a chat with multiple moderators, and the first moderator to see it will respond, or you can chat with any of them individually.

(Note: If you are contacting a moderator to alert them to a post in the forum, please see ‘4. How to flag a post’)

To learn how to contact a moderator, Click here

12. Forum tips and tricks

If you have read through this Quick Guide and haven’t been able to find the information you were looking for, another place to try is the ‘Forum tips and tricks’ page. Moderators are constantly answering questions from members on how to do certain things on the forum, so hopefully the answer you are looking for is in there. If not, don’t hesitate to post in there and ask your question.

To go to ‘Forum tips and tricks’ page, Click Here