Introducing new forum features – part 1

[HelenL_BCC]

Forum-wide changes:

1. Bookmarking and notifications

We’ve introduced a simpler way to keep tabs on your threads: bookmarking.

It’s a quick and easy way of getting straight to the conversations that are of most interest to you.

To bookmark:

• Go to the board or specific thread you want to bookmark.
• Select Options > Bookmark.
• To bookmark a specific post, go to the post and choose Options > Bookmark 

Subscriptions

It’s also possible to subscribe to a board or thread. The key difference between bookmarking and subscriptions is notifications.

• When you bookmark, you’re reminding yourself of where to find your choice of conversations. You won’t receive any email notifications.

• When you subscribe, you’ll receive an email notification each time someone comments on the board or thread you’ve subscribed to.

We’d recommend switching off subscriptions if you don’t wish to receive email notifications – which could amount to quite a lot of emails if you subscribe to some of our busier boards!

To do this:

• Go to My Profile > Subscriptions and notifications
• My Subscriptions
• Click the tick box next to your subscriptions
• Select Email Subscription Options
• Delete selected subscriptions

2. Profile pages

If you’ve explored your profile (‘My Profile’, on the right-hand side of the page), you’ll have noticed that there are now lots more options for customising your settings.

One of the key things you’ll want to do when you’ve registered is upload your profile picture. It’s called an ‘Avatar’ in our new forum.  Don’t ask us why 

The default image users are assigned when they first join is a pink van:

 

The key to changing this to your choice of image is to go to:

• My Profile > Avatars
• Look for the text link Upload an Avatar (it’s underneath your current avatar)
• You can then browse your computer or tablet to find the picture you’d like to use.

Please note: you'll need to ensure your choice of image is stored on your computer and tablet beforehand. 

3. Ordering Threads and boards

We’re keen to hear which way you prefer to read and keep track of threads on this forum. We’ve set the default view to be ‘newest posts displayed first’. However, we know that some of you feel the old way of presenting threads – ‘oldest posts first’ makes more sense.

This is your forum, and we want to ensure that we get it right for as many of you as possible, so we'll be sure to take your feedback into consideration. 

You can change the order of boards and threads to chronological, or ‘oldest first’ easily:

• Go to My Profile > Preferences
• Linear Layout (setting order of threads)
• Select ‘Oldest first’
• Save

You should then be back to viewing posts and threads in date order 

Having read about these new features, more information can be found about EVEN MORE new features in our part 2