Guide to Authoring

Your first stops before diving into the discussion board should be the Discussion Rules and Formatting Ideas for Your Posts.  Unlike simple comments to articles on the site, comments to the discussion board can be as simple or as elaborate as you like.  You will be typing in your comments to an editor on the page that looks like this:

You will notice that the editor has a toolbar at the top of the editing window that allows you to format your post in a number of ways.  If you are familiar with Microsoft Word, or formatted emails, you will probably be familiar with a number of these tools.  For professional style formatting and layout, read Using the Kupu Editor.

We expect that our members will have a very wide range of skills with regard to editing text, so we have provided a special area on the Discussion Board, called the Sandbox, where you can make posts just to try out the editor without having to ruin any brilliant ideas with some mistaken formatting.

Like comments to articles, discussion board posts are made immediately, without review.  The board is monitored, which means a site administrator may remove posts which don't follow the rules, but otherwise conversations are free to proceed fairly quickly. You have two slightly different ways of making a post.

First, at the bottom of every page of a conversation is a kupu editor window, which allows you to type in a post immediately.  Once you have composed your post, click on the post comment button and your post will be added to the end of the conversation.  The other way to add a post is to click on a reply to this button contained in any of the posts of the conversation.  This will make a new kupu editor window for you that contains a quoted version of the post you are replying to.  You can then add your comment and post as before.  The quoted reply is useful if you are replying to a post that happened considerably earlier in the conversation and gives readers some context for your comment.  If you are replying to just a small part of their post, you may want to remove the uneeded part. As always, your post will go to the end of the conversation.