You’re new here and want to say “hello” but aren’t sure how to do it? Have no fear, this guide will walk you through the process!
First Step – Introduce Yourself
You may have joined the forum because you have a perplexing problem and you’d like to get advice on how to resolve it. Or you might be anxious to show off your latest invention.
But, before you do that, you should take the time to introduce yourself. It only takes a couple of moments and it has several advantages:
- It adds the “human touch”. After all, you’re an amazing individual who has led an interesting life and you have a lot to offer. We’d all like to get to know you.
- It gives you practice using the forum. You’ll get used to creating a post or a topic, and using the editor.
- It’s the polite thing to do! When you meet a new group of people, socially or professionally, you usually introduce yourself and get to know everyone else. We’re a community on the forum, online, but still a community, and everyone here is very friendly.
After you introduce yourself you may, of course, create a new Topic in an appropriate Section or Subsection detailing your problem or describing your accomplishment.
So how do you go about introducing yourself?
Making Your Introductory Post
First, let’s get some terminology out of the way.
- A Post is an individual entry that you create. It has text, and can also have pictures, video or code in it. For your introduction you’ll probably want to just stick with text.
- A Topic is like a Post, with the addition of a title. It is the first post in a series of posts.
When you want to introduce yourself you can create a new Topic in the Introduce Yourself Section.
Create a New Topic in the “Introduce Yourself” Section
Step 1 – Go to the Introduce Yourself Section.
Step 2 – Click the Add Topic button at the top. This will open up the editor.
Step 3 – Type your introductory text into this editor.
Step 4 – If you want to see what your text will look like you can click the Preview link at the very bottom-left of the editor.
Step 5 – Once you are happy with what you wrote click the Add Topic button, on the bottom right of the editor.
Simple, isn’t it?
Notes about “Moderation”
When you make your first post, or your first few posts, you might get a message saying that “Your Post has been held for Moderation”.
Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong!
New members can sometimes have their posts held for moderation, which means a moderator will need to review it before it is accepted. This is simply a safety thing to protect the forum from evil people who want to spam our members.
This can happen if you put a link or a picture or video into your post. We just need to make sure everything is OK, as we don’t know you yet. It’s nothing personal!
Once a moderator checks your post they will approve it, and it will be “live”. Please keep in mind that we don’t have many moderators, and they are all volunteers, so it could take a few hours. We try to do them as quickly as possible.
Incidentally, as of this writing, we have over 15 thousand posts and we have only disapproved three posts, two of them by the same person (who is no longer a member).
After you make a couple of posts you will no longer be moderated, as we know that you’re a great person and a valuable member of our community!
So go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone – we are all waiting to meet you!