User Profile & Settings
A profile is information about your account that controls how you view information within RICS discussion forums. This includes details about posts you’ve contributed to, personal information you wish to share such as your web address or weblog address, as well as settings that control how you interact with this site such as: time zone, and many other settings.
Setting your timezone will enable RICS discussion forums to display all dates and time relative to your time zone.
A signature is a message that is appended to the end of any posts you make in the forums. You can edit your signature from the profile page. This signature will then appear at the bottom of any messages posted by you.
The date format used to display any date information can be configured from your profile.
Email tracking is a feature which will send emails to you when messages that you are subscribed to change. You can turn off all email tracking globally from your profile.
Privacy & Security
You can have two email addresses on RICS Discussion
Forums. Both can be seen in your Profile page.
- Your private
email address is the address RICS.org (and RICS
Contact Centre) currently holds for you. This can
only be updated at the My Details section of the RICS
website.
- Your public email address is optional and will be visible on your Profile to other members.
The private email address is never shared or displayed publicly. If you wish to share an email address publicly, use the public email address field. The remainder of the profile settings is optional.
NB If you have subscribed to a thread, emails will arrive at your private account.
Navigation
A Forum Group is a top level grouping of related forums. A forum group contains 1 or more forums.
A Forum is a grouping of related threads of discussion. A Forum contains 0 or more threads and 0 or more sub-forums.
A Thread is a grouping of related posts. A Thread contains 1 or more Posts. The first post becomes the Thread and replies to the original post increment details on the Thread, such as the reply count or last post.
|
Thread Icon Legend
|
|
Topic with posts you have not read.
|
|
Topic with posts you have read.
|
|
Popular topic with posts you have not read. A topic
becomes popular after a certain number of views and posts (administrator
defined).
|
|
Popular topic with posts you have read. A topic becomes
popular after a certain number of views and posts (administrator
defined).
|
|
Announcement you have not read
|
|
Announcement you have read
|
|
A pinned topic with posts you have not read. Pinned topics are
displayed before other topics until they become unpinned.
|
|
A pinned topic with posts you have read. Pinned topics are displayed
before other topics until they become unpinned.
|
|
A pinned popular topic with posts you have not read. A pinned topic
with enough views or replies to become popular.
|
|
A pinned popular topic with posts you have read. A pinned topic with
enough views or replies to become popular.
|
|
A locked topic with posts you have not read. Locked topics do not
allow replies.
|
|
A locked topic with posts you have read. Locked topics do not allow
replies.
|
A forum may not display any threads if there are no threads in the forum.
Another reason could be if filters on the display have been applied and no threads match the filter. An example of a filter is filtering to display threads newer than a certain date, such as threads new in the past 2 weeks.
RICS moderators may choose to move, edit, or delete your
post at any time to ensure that the post is topical to
the current forum. For further information, please refer
to the
Terms
and conditions
The icons next to threads when viewing a forum indicate different status. You can move your mouse cursor over these icons to see what the different status / types of threads are.
An announcement is a special post type that is always displayed at the top of a forum for a configured amount of time. The purpose of an announcement is to increase the visibility of certain topics.
A sticky topic is a special post that causes a post to sort to the top of a forum for a specified amount of time. A sticky topic is similar to an announcement, whereas an announcement is displayed separate from other threads and usually does not allow replies.
A locked thread is a special post that does not allow replies. Once a user locks a post or an administrator/moderator locks a thread no more posts are allowed.
Yes, you can sort threads when viewing a forum by Author, Replies, Views, and Last Post. The default sort for a forum is to display the newest threads first (Last Post descending). To sort simply click on the options button at the bottom of the screen and select your desired sort order and click 'Apply'.
The XML icon is linked to the RSS feed for the forum. RSS is used to allow other applications to subscribe to a forum's posts.
This icon indicates the user’s online status. A green icon means the user has been active recently (usually within the last 15 minutes). A red icon means the user has not recently been active. You can hover your mouse over this icon to see details about the user’s past activity.
If you are attempting to access a forum that you have visited before, but now receive an ‘unknown forum’ error there are two likely causes. The first cause is that the forum you are attempting to access is private and you are not signed in. The second cause is that the forum has been removed.
Posting
Yes and no. You cannot type HTML directly into the editor. If you are using Internet Explorer the default editor for creating new posts will be a Rich Text Editor that will automatically format posts using HTML. If you post with a browser other than Internet Explorer a standard HTML textbox is used and BBCode can be used to mark-up posts.
BBCode is a special syntax for formatting plaintext posts.
No. If you wish other Members to view an attachment, please
use the link button to post a URL to where that attachment
(e.g. a Microsoft Word document) can be found online.
Emoticons are graphical elements that can be added within the body of a post to add emotions to the post. Common examples are the use of 'smilies' within the contents of a post: e.g. a 'happy face'
You can post a new message to a forum in several ways depending upon how the administrator has configured the site. When viewing a forum you should see an image button reading New Topic. Clicking on this image button will take you to a form for posting a message.
You can reply to an existing post using either the Reply or Quote image buttons displayed with the post. If you do not see the Reply or Quote image buttons when viewing a post you either do not have permissions to reply or the post may not allow replies.
If the administrator or moderator has configured the forum or your role to allow editing of posts you will see an Edit image button next to posts you have made. Clicking on this image button will allow you to edit your post.
The administrator may have specified a word filter for posts. When word filters are enabled certain words that are deemed to be offensive are filtered and replaced with the ‘*’ character.
See How do I add Signature to my Post? in the User Profile and Settings section.
Private Messages
A private message is like email within RICS Discussion forums. You can send a private message to other RICS members within the RICS Discussion forums, that is visible only to them. No private information, such as the user's email address, is ever disclosed.