Discussion Forum Tips
The discussion forum is the place for students to post questions, answers, and comments. (This help forum is running free bulletin board software called "phpbb.") Students are encouraged to answer others' questions, and to post information that may be helpful to other students.
Points to remember:
- Post in the appropriate forum; in other words, if you are in the DM60A course, post in the DM60A forum.
- Keep posts relevant to the material we are studying in class.
- Never post passwords of any kind.
- Don't forget to log out after using the discussion forum, especially if you are on a public computer.
- Be nice to each other!
- The forum is not the place to discuss personal or administrative matters; email the instructor instead.
- If asking for help with a certain page, it almost always helps to post the URL.
For information on how the discussion forum affects your grade, see the grades page for your course.
The Practice Forum
Make sure you post to the appropriate forum. You will see a "Practice Forum." The Practice Forum is where you can experiment with using the help forum software. After you are comfortable with how to post and reply, then you can use the real forum
Note that there is online help (see the "FAQ" link near the top of any forum page).
Naming topics
When you create a new topic, you must give it a name. Give the topic an appropriate name; it must be descriptive enough so that someone searching through the list of topics can easily tell what the discussion thread is about. For example:
Good topic names:
- Need help validating exercise 7
- Why can't a <p> tag be nested within a <h1> tag?
- When is our next test?
- Stuck on step 4 of exercise 5
- What's the difference between inline level and block level?
Bad topic names:
- Confused
- Question
- Help!
- Hi
- Frustrated, need help
You will not receive credit for posts with topic names that are not descriptive.
How to count your posts
To easily see how many posts (and replies to post)s that you have made:
- Log in to the forum.
- Click the "User Control Panel" link (near the top left of the page). Note: do not click the "view your posts" link; this will list each thread that you have posted in, but will not list each post.
- Click the "Show your posts" link (near the middle of the page).
You can now see each of your posts (including replies), along with the dates of each post. Note that, for the purpose of grading, posts are totalled separately for each period. The couse schedule page lists the deadlines for posting.
Note that credit is not given for posts that are not relevant to the course material, posts without properly descriptive topic names, posts not in the proper forum, posts in the Test forum, or posts which do not conform with what the instructor requires (such as a specific topic for a specific week).
How use an avatar
To use an avatar with this forum:
1) Log in.
2) Click the "User Control Panel" link in the upper left.
2) Click the "Profile" tab.
4) Click the "Edit Avatar" link on the left.
At this step you can either use an avatar from the gallery (avatars that I pre-installed for students to use) or you can upload your own avatar image file.
To use a pre-installed avatar:
5) Click the "Display Gallery " button.
6) Choose a category from the drop-down menu and click "Go."
7) Select your avatar and click the "Submit" button.
To use your own
avatar, you will need to start with an image that is no larger than 100x100
pixels that you have on your disk.
5) Click the "Choose File" button.
6) Navigate to the image on your disk.
7) Click the "Submit" button.