How to Create Your First Topic / Post Your First Reply

So you’re ready to create your first Topic or Post your first reply to an existing Topic. How do you do that?? First you must be Registered for the Forum and Logged in to the Forum. If you’re not registered follow the directions in this FAQ, How To Register And Login To the Forum.

Once you are logged in, click on a link for the main Forum you want to add a new Topic to, or click on a Topic you want to Post a reply to within that Forum. For this Post we’ll work with Creating a new Topic, and creating a Post is nearly identical to creating a Topic except for some minor differences in the screen you’ll be looking at.

Once you are located in the Forum you want to contribute to you have two ways to create a new Topic. In this case we’ll be adding a new Topic to the Equipment and Technical Discussion Forum. Near the top of the page click on the ‘Create New Topic’ link and you’ll be taken to the New Topic area at the bottom of that page.

Or, you can simply scroll to that same section at the bottom of that page. Add text to the Topic Title entry area and then add the text pertaining to your Topic in the large text window below the editing menu bar. You can hover over any of those menu bar icons and it will tell you what they do. If you choose to use any of those edit options you’ll first need to highlight your text and then press the icon to apply that option to your text.

Note below the bottom of the Topic text area is a ‘Notify me’ checkbox and a Submit button. The Notify me checkbox is automatically checked for every Post or Topic you create. When it is checked you will receive an email within minute of someone posting a reply to your Topic or Post. Uncheck that box if you don’t want to receive an email. You can also choose to receive daily or weekly ‘Digest’ (summary) emails by following the directions in the Forum Digest Email Setup FAQ.

Finally, remember to press the blue ‘Submit’ button at the bottom right of the screen. You can always go back to your post and edit or delete it if you want by following the directions at the How to Edit or Delete Your Posts FAQ.