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• General Guidelines
• Posting Methods
• Posting Form
• Editing Posts

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Posts in the Forums on this Message Board must be pertinent to ancestors/descendants of members of Ripples Across The Years families, allied families, and/or events/places associated with these families.

A few general guidelines:

Ripples Across The Years are family-oriented sites. This means posts must be in good taste, suitable for young children to read, and respectful of the privacy and feelings of living people. We expect users to adhere to our Privacy Statement.

The purpose of the Message Board Posting is three-fold:

1. To provide those interested in these families a place to post queries pertient to these families. We realize there are many forums/message boards on the Internet where this can and has been done. But we believe it would be nice to have all the information pertaining to these families in one central location if possible. This should be of benefit to all family researchers.

2. To provide a place to post announcements (births, weddings, reunions, celebrations, etc.) that may be of interest to extended family members.

3. To provide a place for users who post to the Story Board to let others know an update has been made to the Story Board.

Users have the ability to edit or delete their posts. Therefore, whenever a user realizes there is an error in a previous post, the user should correct that post so that errors are not perpetuated.

One of the goals of the Message Board is to keep it simple (the KISS principle) and uncluttered. Therefore, the following guidelines should be kept in mind when posting:

The Message Board is NOT a Story Board. We have provided a Story Board where stories should be posted. Lengthy postings that should be placed on the Story Board will be deleted. The Story Board is accessible from the menu of the individual websites.

Lengthy family trees should NOT be posted on the Message Board. It has been observed on other boards that these trees are posted numerous times in response to different queries. Not only do such posts eat up web storage space paid for by others (in this case the webmaster of Ripples Across The Years sites), they are never corrected and therefore errors are perpetuated.

Information that is already in the Family Trees on these websites or in any other section of the websites should NOT be replicated here. It IS appropriate to point to this data if it would be helpful.

Users should make every effort to post in or create appropriate topics.

The board should NOT be used for chit-chat. We have been frustrated in using other boards/forums, and you probably have been too, due to the inclusion of idle "chit-chat" messages which do not further the knowledge of those seeking information and in which 99% of the users are not interested.

Users should make every effort to post in appropriate categories. This should not be too difficult to adhere to since there are not that many categories and their usage is plainly identified.

Users should make every effort to post in or create appropriate topics.

POSTING METHODS

There are three ways to post a message:

Create a New Topic - New topics are created by clicking on the New Topic button in the upper left corner of the View Forum or the View Toipic pages. This will take you to the posting form, and, when you have posted, will create a new topic with your post as the first one in the topic.

Post a New Message in an Existing Topic -On the Topic page, you may click Add Reply. This will take you to the posting form, and, when you have posted, it will add your post to the topic you replied to. This terminology is a little misleading. In this case, 'reply' means to post a new message under the topic. You are not necessarily 'replying' to a specific message.

Reply to a Specific Message Posted by Someone Else - To reply to a specific message, you may click the Quote button in the upper right corner of that post.

The Add Reply method will show all the messages previously posted under the topic. This is handy if you need to keep refering back to a message in order to complete your post.

The Quote method also shows all the previously posted messages for the topic, but it puts the message you are specifically replying to at the top. In addition, the entire original message is quoted in your message. PLEASE don't quote any more of the original message than is necessary to make it clear which message you are replyingt to. Too much quoting only clutters up the board, making it difficult for others to follow the "thread". You can usually identify the message to which you are replying by indicating the poster's username and the date of the post. Anyone can then go back and read that post for themselves.

POSTING FORM

The posting form is pretty straightforward. The major sections are described below.

Subject - Enter the subject of your post. If this is a new post, the subject is required, and it will be the name of the topic. If the post is replying to another post, the subject is not required, but may be added, and will be shown at the top of the post. NOTE: NEW TOPIC subjects should adhere to the following guidelines:

Smilies - Smilies (also called emoticons) can be added to posts. You may include a smily/emoticon in your message by clicking on the desired smily in the lefthand margin of the posting form. Numerous smilies are available. You may click on 'View more Emoticons' to see additional ones. You may disable Smilies in the post if you wish.

BBCode - BBCode allows you to add special formatting to your posts. BBCode is a system that will allow you to format your posts in special ways. The BBCode system uses tags in a way very similar to most word processing programs such as WORD, Notepad, etc. The major difference is that BBCode uses square brackets [ and ] instead of angle brackets < and >. For a more detailed description of how BBCode works, click the small BBCode link on the lower left corner of the posting form ('live' page not the one show above!). You may disable BBCode in the post if you wish.

HTML - You may use a limited amount of HTML to format your posts. The HTML tags allowed are b, i, u, pre, center. You may disable HTML in the post if you wish.

Reply Notification - You may be interested in knowing when the topic has been replied to. If so, yo9u may check Notify me when a reply is posted. For more information, see Watching Topics.

Preview - You may click on the Preview button to see what your message will look like before you actually post it. The 'preview' will open up in the top portion of the posting form. You may make any changes/adjustments in the Message Body. This process may be repeated as much as needed.

Submit - When you are satisfied with your post, you may click on the Submit button. This will post your message and return you to the View Topic screen.

Topic Review - The Topic Review section will appear beneath the Preview/Submit buttons if your post is a reply or quote. It does not show if your post is a new topic.

EDITING POSTS

Editing allows you to go back and fix errors, remove incorrect information, or add new information to your posts. To edit a post, look at the top right corner of your post and click Edit. You will be taken to the posting form to edit your post, then click Submit to post it. If you edit a post after it has been replied to, a small message will appear at the bottom of it indicating how many times it has been edited, and when the last edit occurred.

To delete a post, click Delete and check Delete this Post. Click Submit to finish deleting the post. You may not delete a post if it has been replied to (i.e. it is not the last post in the topic).

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