Website Forums – Tips & Tricks #1

All,

A few people have asked me to write a tutorial and/or do a Club meeting presentation on using our website.  This post – Website Forums – Tips & Tricks #1 – is my first stab at that.  Let me begin by acknowledging the WordPress forums offerings are very, very, crude and limited.  I have explored more feature rich options and it is my hope that one can be implemented in the not-to-distant future.  But, for our current needs, the forums feature we do have does work and it does offer some tools that might not be too obvious, so here we go.

We will start off assuming that you are logged in.  If you need help with that, please call or drop me a note.  The reason for being logged in?  Some of the site features are not available, and not even visible, to visitors.  Why?  Two examples are that we (you) don’t want unregistered visitors making posts to our forums or looking at our membership directory.  Enough said?  So, please be logged in.

Then, along the top-right, look for FORUMS:

Clicking there will load the FORUMS page.  Right now we have seven topics: recently added “Announcements”, as well as Events, General Q&A, General Ragchew, Hardware (Buying? Selling? Question?), News, Educational – Graphics/Photos/Diagrams and Digital Knowledge.

Clicking on any one of the blue hyperlinked titles will open up that respective forum.  Really important notes here:

1) Please click Announcements and note the button over to the right that says “Subscribe”.  I previously defaulted everyone to globally be subscribed to all the newly posted forum topics, but a member complained that he did not want the news ones and it was a bit complicated to unsubscribe him since he couldn’t figure it out for himself.  So, I defaulted that feature to off.  I strongly suggest that you click Subscribe for at least the Announcements forum area.  If you do that then NEWLY POSTED TOPICS will generate an email to you.  I assure you that you are not going to get slammed with a bunch of emails AND when Subscribe is clicked it changes to Unsubscribe.  You can click what is then the Unsubscribe button and turn it off anytime you wish.  But it is really important to note this – Subscribing in one topic DOES NOT subscribe you within the other topics.  Said another way, if you subscribe to Announcements, you will not get notice of new topics posted to the News section.  You must Subscribe in each of the (currently) seven topic sections to get notice of new items posted there.

2) Once someone makes up a new topic you will be notified, but YOU WILL NOT get emails when people make follow up posts to the topic unless you opt to.  Please click the Club President Mark Johnson (W5PTX) topic RRVARC Christmas Party 12/9/24 and when it opens up, note that you can Subscribe/Unsubscribe using the same button within the topic.  If you do that, then and only then you will get email notices of follow up posts.

As I started off saying, the WordPress forums is very primitive as compared to a lot of other forums you may be familiar with.  Having said that, you can italicize, bold and hyperlink within posts.  I have also recently eased uploading pictures directly into posts.

If any of this gives you any trouble, please click here email and let me know.  I personally think the website is crucially important to Club growth and eventual corporate sponsorship.  Looking back on 11/14/2024 we got over 1,600 website visits last month.  Think about that, over 1,600 people came to our site looking for something.  Many were Google search results that lead to us.  We have had people join us because they did a search for a club nearby and we were the top and/or most relevant result.  There is a lot, not overwhelming but a lot, of really good information available to you.  Oh, one more thing – A couple of years ago one member told me that he was hesitant to participate because there just didn’t seem to be that many people making posts.  I told him that study after study had shown that only 2-3% of forum users actually make posts (I can provide sources if anyone requests them.).  So, always keep that in mind when you see the number of posts being made.  They are being read by far, far, more people than you might otherwise expect.  And under the hood, our website statistics bear these numbers out.

73

Phillip Beall (W5EBC)