Tips on Using Discussion Forum

[T.O.Lee]

During the Christmas and New Year holidays, the Discussion Forum will be quiet for most parts of the world for obvious reasons. For those active members, now is a good time to look around the various buttons and facilities available that we have neglected in the past due to busy involvement in the topics, the messages and their respective responses.

We would like to share some tips to make life easier in the Discussion Forum.

(1) Please click the "Preference" button on the top bar and change the default, if necesssary, to make sure that the new topics and the new messages would come first when you open the DC Pro web page. Then each day you can see the new topics and the new messages first rather than the old ones that you have seen them already yesterday or a couple of weeks ago.

(2) You may increase the default setting of 10/20 topics and 10/20 messages on each page both to 200 so that in case you wish to find the old topics or the old messages, you don't have to click each time on "1-20, 20-40, 40-60" and so on. All the 100 plus messsges would then appear on the same page. We change the two defaults to 900 to avoid frequent changes in default setting.

(3) If you wish to see all the messages from a particular member, you may click on his name as appearing on the left hand side in any of his messages and get them all appearing on one page.

(4) If you wish to go from one forum to another, such as from "UCP 500" to "ISP 98", don't use the "Back" or "Forward" button on the top bar provided by Internet Explorer or Netscape. Go for the buttons provided by DC Pro, that is the "Forum" button or the "Change Forum" window and "Go" button and pick up your desired forum. This works out much faster than using the "Back" and "Forward" buttons.

(5) Sometimes if you are not careful and touch one of the keys in the keyboard, or click on the "Post Reply" button twice and a warning message pops up telling you that you cannot put the finished message on, you may use "copy and paste" feature in the "Edit" button and then erase the duplicated message(s). After making sure that the finished message has been copied before being erased, you may then click on the "Post Reply" button again and click "Copy" in the "Edit" button to add the finished message on.

(6) Don't write your message on the empty frame that appears after clicking the "Post Reply" button, unless you are absolutely sure that your message is a simple and short one. Otherwise, as suggested by one member previously, write your message using a word processing software, such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect or Wordstar. Then you can check spelling (which is not yet provided by the DC Pro) and do your own editing. Afterwards, you use "copy and paste" method to add your finished message onto the empty frame. This is more time saving and ensure there is no typo error in your message.

(7) In fact, you don't have to leave the DC Pro for the word processing software. DC Pro also provides MS Word 97 when you click on the "File" button/bar on top.

(8) When you edit your message already posted in a Forum for more than one time, please make sure to erase the editing date and time records that appear automatically at the end of your message. Otherwise it looks messy and this also takes up the valuable storage capacity of the DC Pro server that can be more efficiently used for other purposes.

(9) The "Post Reply" and "Post New Topic" buttons are available both on the top and bottom parts of a message. So you need not always go to the bottom or the top part of a message to find these buttons. To be honest, we find out this only during the Christmas idle time when we are less busy and start to explore the the DC Pro web page.

(10) Please take your time and explore other buttons on top such as "File", "Edit", "View", "Favorites", "Tools" and "Help" that offer a lot of options and facilities, such as checking your emails without leaving the DC Pro, writing in other languages such as Chinese ¸t½Ï§Ö¼Ö¡A·s¦~¶i¨B¡I(we believe this is the first Chinese ever appearing in the DC Pro Discussion Forum) and so on. But we encourage you to leave the DC Pro when you perform other tasks in order to enable other members to access the DC Pro that may have limits in number of visitors per session. This also helps other members to access the DC Pro faster.

(11) If you encounter any trouble or find anything abnormal, please report them to the DC Pro management by clicking on the "Comments/Suggestions" button at the right hand side of the frame.

(12) We are also glad to hear some other useful tips from members.

Happy surfing! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

http://www.tolee.com

[edited 1/2/02 9:54:56 PM]

[larryBacon]

My thanks to T.O. Lee for his list of tips on using the Discussion Forum. One additional suggestion I woulld like to make is to place postings in each of the relevant Fora. (UCP 500 for L/C only, General can include URDG, URC etc). I say this at the risk of being accused of hypocrisy as this posting should really be in the General Forum.

Laurence