Forum Maint | WSA Help Site

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The definition of Forum that most closely relates to the ones generally available on the Internet is "A public meeting place for open discussion." The forums provided with the WSA are intended to be public discussion groups, but they can also be password protected so that only registered users can access them.

Set up a Public Forum

Setting up a public forum is pretty straightforward.

Create a page for the forum (if there is not one already). The page style needs to be "Forum".
If you want it available somewhere in the site navigation, be sure to set the parent page.

That is all you need to do for any forums that are already created. They should now show up on this page. If no forums have yet been created, or if you want to add some or change what's there, carry on...

Create or Modify a Forum

First create forum categories. You can then put as many forums in each category as it makes sense to. As you can see, we have craeted three categories here and have put just one or two forums into each one. There is no real limit to the number of forums and you may find the need for more grows over time, depending on how much usage they get and how much the topics of conversation expand. Many successful forums have dozens of categories with hundreds of forum topics.

To add a new category or add a new forum to an existing category, click on the relevant "Add" button. To edit an existing category or forum topic, click on the appropriate link.

When you add a new forum, you must give it a name (usually the topic), a description, and assign it to a specific category. Each forum can be assigned to only one category. You can also choose whether the forum is moderated and active/inactive.

Click the ADD button and you'll be taken back to the main Forum Maintenance page, where your new forum will be listed. Before it will show up on the web site, though, you must assign security groups to it. Security groups designates who gets to see it.

Click on the forum title and then the "select" button to set the security groups.

There are usually only two security groups that are relevant to a forum on the public web site... Public and Member Restricted. These sound like exactly what they are.

A Public forum is open to anybody who comes to the web site.
A Member Restricted forum requires that an individual be registered as a user with the web site and be logged in to the site before access to the forums is granted.

Forum Maint

·	Forum Maint
·	Set up a Public Forum
·	Create or Modify A Forum
·	Create A Members Only Forum
·	What is a Moderated Forum?
·	Set Up a Moderated Forum

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