Forums

Communication tools for your site

Incorporating a forum or discussion board to your website may be a great way to communicate directly with your visitors. Organisations can even add forums to their extranet or intranet sites as a way of communicating between each other, and even sharing information. Benefits include the ability to make a discussion board public or completely private with only approved users able to access the board, as well as uniting geographically located groups together.

Features

Once a member of a discussion board, users will be able to participate and utilise some of the enhanced features, including the ability to attach documents to discussions (eg, pdf, Word documents, etc.), as well as the ability to discuss the documents;

Discussion area: general features

• Unlimited discussion areas (categories, etc.) and sub-discussion areas
• Members can easily subscribe to a discussion – and will be automatically notified when there are any updates to the discussion (at any time, you can simply check the subscribe checkbox to a discussion)
• Display active topics of all sub-discussion areas
• Ability to publish attachments in discussion topics area (pdf, .doc, images, etc.)
• Multiple attachments allowed

When members login to discussion area:

• They will automatically be able to view “new” discussions (different icons will display to demonstrate new discussions)

Optional automatic notification

• Members can opt to be notified when any updates to existing discussions take place on the ACCE website.  Members have the option of being notified automatically by email if and when another member responds.
• Other members logged on will automatically know who else is online

Search features

• Search inside discussions
• Select multiple discussion areas and categories to search
• Search within discussion titles only
• Can also search for members posts

Administration and security features

• Discussion board setup - public or private
• Permissions: ability to setup discussions with different levels of access
• No access or hidden topics
• Read only (ability to view but not participate in discussions)
• Standard access (ability to view and participate in discussions)
• "Manager" access (ability to manage discussions)
• Ability to setup "private" discussions
• Permissions: customised group access