Tom

ParentingForums.org Survival Guide

Hopefully this thread will be useful for both new forum-goers and veterans. Skip over what you already know and tell me if I'm forgetting anything!

What can I do here?

Well besides the basics (uh, reading & posting) you can create and vote in polls, post pictures, post calendar events, send and receive private messages with other users, setup buddy lists, use avatars and more.

Some cool forum features you might not know about

Have you seen the titles underneath user's name? ("Junior Member", "PF Regular", etc.) Those titles show how many posts a user has made at ParentingForums.org. As a user hits certain numbers of posts, their title will change.

The reputation system is a nice feature. If you find someone's post useful you can give them a reputation point - likewise if you think a post wasn't so hot you can subtract a reputation point. To do either click the Yin Yang icon below their name in a post. If you see that someone has a high reputation, it might be an indicator that they're a good person to pay attention to. Both reputation and reputation power (the ability to give/take away reputation) are shown in the user display on each post. Reputation power (the ability to give or take reputation) is given out to users based on time as a member, post count, and the user's own reputation.

RSS

RSS syndication allows you to view newly created threads in guest viewable forums without visiting the board using an RSS reader (such as Google Reader or FeedDemon).

RSS .91 - http://parentingforums.org/external.php?type=rss
RSS 2.0 - http://parentingforums.org/external.php?type=rss2

The forums to which this applies can also be limited to specific guest viewable forums by adding another parameter to the URL containing the forumids as follows:

http://parentingforums.org/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=123

If you would like the content to be generated for multiple forums you can separate the forumids by commas.

Any of these URLs can be added to MyYahoo as well.

About our forum's platform

ParentingForums.org uses the vBulletin forum software. vBulletin is the best forum software available. It allows all kinds of cool things that aren't available in other forum systems. Why doesn't everyone use vBulletin? Simply because it costs money. Many of the other forum packages are either free or substantially cheaper than vBulletin. We think the idea behind ParentingForums.org is worth having the best.

The Rules

1. No personal attacks!
2. No spam! This includes Personal Message spam and link spam (coming here only to promote another site without contributing to our community). Because of persistent link spammers, you may not post hyperlinks until you've achieved a 50+ post-count. Cross-posting falls into this category as well. Submit a thread to only 1 sub-forum.
3. Have fun!

The Goal

We'd love to be known as a parenting forum that is truly about parenting. There are other parenting communities but visiting some of them you might find yourself wading through posts about this week's reality tv or celebrity gossip. We definitely think there is room for non-parenting talk here (hopefully kept mainly to our General Chat forum) but overall the goal is pretty simple - parenting discussion - helping each other be better parents for the benefit of our kids. I hope you get that idea from the overall organization of the forums.

Have ideas for other things we can do? Let us know!

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edit 4/19/07: added RSS information
edit 4/25/07: updated link-posting requirements
edit 9/12/07: updated spam rules to include cross-posting

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