The following document contains answers to questions that are asked frequently by Psych 208 Discussion Board users.
Psych 208 Discussion Board is a moderated discussion board. Its purpose is to provide an electronic discussion forum that is accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web (WWW). Users can initiate and contribute to conversations. Conversations are monitored and organized by moderators (your instructor and/or T.A.s). Psych 208 Discussion Board is ideal for extending classroom discussions to the WWW, conducting electronic conferences, and hosting public discussions.
Psych 208 Discussion Board is organized into topics; each topic may have subtopics, and so on. The basic topic structure is set up by the board administrator and the topic moderators. Within each subtopic are conversations about an aspect of the topic and/or additional subtopics. Users can post messages to these conversations.
Anyone with access to the World Wide Web may access Psych 208 Discussion Board and read any of the posts on Psych 208 Discussion Board. However, only users may post messages. User accounts are created by your instructor and distributed in class.
If you do want to post anonymously, you can check the Post message as "Anonymous" option at the bottom of the posting form, in which case you will be referred to as "Anonymous" on the posting screen. However, a log is kept of all posts, and the board administrator or moderators can trace objectionable messages. This may not be an option in your discussion group, however.
You can format your post using a set of formatting tags. You do not have to know HTML to use these formatting tags; use this formatting guide to help you jazz up your posts.
At the discretion of the moderator, links to various World Wide Web (WWW) documents can be included on topic pages. When you click on a such link, you are brought away from Psych 208 Discussion Board. However, in most cases, the Psych 208 Discussion Board main menu is still displayed in the frame to the left of the screen. To get back to Psych 208 Discussion Board, either use your browser's back button or click on the "Psych 208 Discussion Board Topics" link from the Psych 208 Discussion Board main menu.
Depending on your browser and operating system, some special characters and formatting will not be displayed correctly. This is especially noticable with browsers below Netscape Navigator 3.0 and below Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. Some fonts are specific to the Windows operating system and will not be displayed correctly on other platforms.
To contact moderators, click on the "Contact Moderators" link from the main menu. If you are reading a particular topic, you will be presented with a list of all moderators for that topic. The board administrator for Psych 208 Discussion Board is also listed on the contact page.
At the discretion of the moderators, Psych 208 Discussion Board includes the ability for users to set up a "user profile." Users may specify their e-mail address, full name, and whether or not they want to receive e-mail notification of posts. Users may also change their passwords. To access the user profile editor, click on "User Profile" from the main menu.
The most effective way to use the new message reader is to perform your search, checking for new messages since you last checked (by providing your username and password). When the results are displayed, choose to open the link in a new browser window. When you are finished reading the messages (and posting any replies), close the new window and then continue down the list of new messages. This is currently not an option.
The keyword search engine searches the text of messages in those topics that you select and returns the results based on the number of times that any of the keyword(s) appear on the page, i.e., an "or" search. You can perform a "custom search" to require or exclude words as follows:
Check out the troubleshooting guide.