Web Forums are online discussion
forums (a.k.a. bulletin boards) that enable users to communicate ideas, feelings and comments with others
in a structured and organized manner. Generally, web forums are organized
using a "thread" principle whereby messages and replies are grouped
together around topics. Users are allowed to post new
messages, follow up to existing messages and more. Unlike chat rooms,
forums are not "real time".
In order to be eligible to request a web forum, you have to have a valid account. A valid account is a faculty/staff member
of one of the four colleges (American River, Sacramento
City, Cosumnes River, and Folsom) who has a valid web login ID. To get to the
Web Forum Request page,
please choose your campus from the following drop down menu:
(For Web Forums at ARC, please contact Phil Smith.)
If you have a web forum and you wish to remove it or clear the entries from
it, you
can go to the Web Forum Administration page which will allow you to do either choice.
Each campus has their own administration page. To get to the
Web Forum Administration page,
please choose your campus from the following drop down menu:
(For Web Forums at ARC, please contact Phil Smith.)
You can have as many web forums as you require for instructional or
departmental purposes. As long as you create a
web forums with a unique
abbreviation from the other web forum, you will be able to create multiple
web forums. However, please remember to remove
the web forums if you no longer have any use for them, or re-use them so that the number of
web forums does not take up too much
disk space on the server.
Your web forum entry most likely did not show up because your browser did not reload the
page, it simply pulled it out of cache. Pulling a web page out of "cache" means that the first time you view the page,
the browser stores the page in memory. When you go back to the web forum page, it retrieves the previously viewed page
from memory and displays it, without updating the web page in memory. In order to update the web page in memory, hit the
"reload" or "refresh" button on the browser.
The unique abbreviation is a way of identifying your different forums.
This unique
abbreviation can be a maximum of 8 characters, and may only contain letters,
numbers, underscores and hyphens. New forums will be set up in the directory
forum-(unique abbreviation) under the forum user's public_html directory.
When you create a web forum, you will be required to enter a unique abbreviation
for the web forum. This unique abbreviation will be appended to the standard
web forum directory
name prefix forum- to form the web forum directory name.
For example, if you enter "csc101" for your unique abbreviation, the sub-directory that is created in your
web account will be forum-csc101. All files necessary for your web
forum will be placed in this
sub-directory.
Upon successful creation of your web forum, you can setup a secondary account for another person
who you want to manage your web forum. In order to do so, you
need to go to the Web Forum Administration page found on your college's web server.
Note: Unlike guestbooks, Secondary Administrators may only
administer one web forum. To set up secondary administrators for all
your web forums, you must set each one up individually.
A guestbook is a linear listing of visitor comments, questions, and posts. It does not allow other visitors
to post comments or replies directly to someone else's post. Each new message is simply posted to the top of
the guestbook page.
A web forum is like a threaded conversation, allowing students to post individual messages, as well as
reply to existing messages in more of a "discussion board" format. A reply to an existing message is posted
directly underneath the existing message, so that threads of conversations/topics are grouped together for
easy location.
