Open Forum

Hello, friends! This is one part of a series of blogs about maximizing your experience with our online Community, not only to help newbies get their bearings but to also help those seasoned users learn more to take the next steps or help others. Today, we're going to review some newer features that will make Open Forum life a little easier.

QUICK REPLY

When you reply to a discussion, you will no longer be taken to a new page to write your reply. Instead, a text editor will appear right under the message you're replying to so that you can see every post on the thread while you write your response.

Some of the functionalities are hidden in this basic editor, so if you like to do fancy things like change the color of your font, you'll need to select the "..." button for the "Expand Plus Editor," which will give you a few more options.

AUTOSAVE and SAVE AS DRAFT

Drafts of your post will now be saved automatically as you type them (it saves about every 20 seconds). If you accidentally close the window or something crashes, your draft is safe and sound. You can also choose to "save as draft" at any time.

When you choose to save a draft, you'll see this message:

You can find your draft later by navigating to your profile and then clicking on My Contributions > List of Contributions.

PARTICIPATION NOTIFICATIONS

This update has three components:
- If you start a thread, you will immediately get an email when someone replies letting you know you got a reply.
- If you reply to a thread, you immediately get an email when anyone else replies.
- If you don't post anything, but are interested in the discussion, there will be a large star icon next to the title of the thread. You can click this star to subscribe and get notifications any time someone posts.

Currently, you have to track your daily digests to see any replies to discussions you participate in. We know this is cumbersome and it's easy to miss replies, so I'm thrilled to see how this last update will enhance your conversations. I think it will help everyone stay more in touch with the discussions and topics they are most interested in, and we hope this makes it much easier to participate and have active back-and-forth conversations.

Of course, you can unsubscribe from these extra notifications if you don't want them by navigating to your profile and selecting My Account > Email Preferences and selecting "No" on Participation Emails.

Also, don't forget about the "@mention" feature that was incorporated earlier this year. If you want to bring someone's attention to a specific post, you can use the "@" symbol, then begin typing their name. They will receive an email notification that you've tagged them in the thread. You can read more information about that feature here.

We're really excited for these changes and look forward to your feedback. You can review past "Community Tips" blogs here. Please let us know if you have questions!