I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I cannot find it in the FAQs or the forums.

What is the difference between the User Forum and the Message Forum? When is it advantageous to use one or the other?

Thanks,

Message Forum is a single topic or no topic. User Forums - you can organize the messages into topics and classmates can see the topic and respond to that specific topic in the forum. The User Forum was supposed to replace the Message Forum, but there were too many classes that were confused by the User Forum and liked the Message Forum that both features remained in the product.

Our Message Forum (no topics) is titled "Classmate Conversations." It was fun to see it being used by several classmates when a small get together was planned in Florida. Our User Forum (with 18 different topics) is titled Forums. Aside from the FL get together, and over 200 classmates, we've had no luck getting anyone to contribute to either of these forums. But, I know of another class web site where their forums are used a lot for day-to-day conversation.

Thank you both, Kyle and Rhonda. It's clear now. Now let's see if I have any luck getting people to participate in either one.

I used the User Forums and seeded them with provocative questions. There has been only a couple of responses with >100 classmates on the site. In other words, a complete bust.

What has worked to increase participation?

Also, how do you add a MessageForum?

Message Forum should be one of the pages in your Edit Site Pages list. The default is active, so if you don't see it in your menu it's either been made inactive or renamed.

Message Forum should be in your list of pages on your EDIT SITE PAGES list. I think it is at the very bottom of the list and not activated.

I am helping another class from my old school to build a Class Of website. I am not root manager for this new site, but have administrator status. I'm having trouble adding a the two types of Message Forum to the new site..the default has switched off and I can only set them up as a a class forum (open page). We need the formatting of Message Forums to evoke interactions from our members. How do I restore the default?
Graham.

Message Forum Edit Link Edit Page Preview
Is the bottom option of the Edit Site Pages page. It is currently not activated.

Thanks! I now have that set up. But I also need the other default format, please...the one that allows members to set the forum topics and sub-topics, and these are tabulated on the opening page of the feature. "Class Forum?"
Graham.

Please open/help me with this Class Forum (?) feature on www.dhsclassof1968.com

Graham.

The USER FORUM is there, too.

Hi Kyle,

Many thanks. Those two default Forum features were not showing in our Edit Pages list. Should I have found them elsewhere when they were not showing?

Our Root administrator, Andrew Stringer, says he can't get onto the site as Root. He is listed twice when I open Manage Classmates and Details. How do we fix this?

Help needed.

Thanks,

Graham

He is using the same email for both accounts. If he has a different password, just sign in with his ADMIN password. If he made both passwords the same, have him log in with the password he knows, then find out which account he is logged in and change the password. (write it down to remember it as the NON-ADMIN password). Then log out and log back in with the original password again. This should log him in as the ADMIN.

If he has forgot his password, use the FORGOT PASSWORD link on the home page. Since the accounts are the same, it is random which password the system will send, if the email accounts are the same. Follow the steps above to resolve the issue.

Since his email account is a gmail.com account, he could also use aliasing to make it so that he uses a different email, but it resolves to the same address to receive emails. For example, if his email address was "durbanadmin@gmail.com" (but it isn't), he could use "durban.admin@gmail.com" for one account and "durban.a.d.m.i.n@gmail.com" for the other one (gmail ignores the dot in the username portion of an email address).

See this article for more cool stuff you can do with gmail accounts:
http://www.mixthenet.com/gmail-powerful-tips/