FORUM HELP
Part 1: Questions related to the Discussions
- Introduction to the Forum
- What questions are allowed?
- What does this
Icon mean
- Why didn't you just make this a Chat
Room or just the NDT newsgroup?
Part 2: Questions related to the message board technique
- Introduction to the message board
- How do I post a message?
- How do I reply to a message?
- What does "URL attachment" mean?
- Can I use html tags anywhere in my posts?
- Why are there colons in the message section when
I try to
post a follow up?
- Why didn't my post show up?
- Where can I get the original scripts for this
program?
Part 1: Questions related to the Program
Introduction to the Forum
This forum is a permanent forum on NDTnet, moderated by Rolf Diederichs.
As usual NDTnet's month's issue will focus on our discussion theme,
actually it is an Article Discussion Forum, but if you are interested in other nondestructive testing topics, don't hesitate to discuss them in this forum as well.
This forum is somewhat similar to what we have done in previous workshops by
means of an 'Ask the Expert Message Board'.
That does not mean that we have no experts anymore, there is still a permanent pool of Corresponding
Authors as participants and hopefully continue their excellent contributions.
Also many excellent answers are been posted by all participants of this forum - most of the forum participants are experts!
The discussion procedure will be based on an interactive
form - that means readers will fill in their questions or contributions,
and
readers' posts will be automatically transferred to the Forum page
and listed there.
To make it as convenient as possible for you,
the message board will include a mailing list.
That means everyone will automatically receive the submitted topic by email.
Attachments may be downloaded from the message board but will not be
forwarded to the email list.
What questions are allowed?
All questions which are related to NDT are allowed.
Please use the Classified Ads Board for themes like For Sell, Jobs, etc..
As well you may check the NDT NewsWeb, the Link to "sci.techniques.testing.nondestructive"
What does this Icon mean
We've added "profile" icons in the forum in an attempt to compensate for the lack of face to face contact in cyberspace. This icon will appear along with the message of registered users. The link will be also distributed with the message send to the mailing list.
Just click on the icon and you will get to the profile of the member.
Also special 'Author Profile' 
icon will be shown; that icon will appear for all NDTnet authors registered to this forum.
Why doesn't this workshop operate on a Chat Channel or just the NDT newsgroup?
That's a delicate issue, there are pros and cons. Considering the current situation we decided that
this program is more suitable for our purposes.
Usually questions are answered promptly, within 1-2 days.
Part 2: Questions related to the message board
technique
Introduction
This workshop is based on a Message Board principles from
WWWBoard Version 2.0 ALPHA 2. and was modified by
NDTnet. Since this is an alpha version, there
may well be undiscovered bugs. Please report problems to
rd@ndt.net.
In order to post a message, you must be using a browser with forms
support. We
recommend the Netscape Navigator v.3.1 or higher.
How do I post a message?
Go the link Post Message, and fill in your name,
e-mail
address, the subject, and the message.
Then click on the "Post Message" button below the message
window
to submit the message.
Attachments:
The following optional fields appear in both the main message and reply
forms:
- Optional Link URL:
- A URL (your Homepage) which you want included as a hypertext
link
in your
message.
- Link Title:
- The hypertext which you want to appear that links
to
the LINK URL.
This text will be set off with a bullet at the end of the message. For
instance, if
you want a link to your home page, http://www.ndt.net, and the
title
is NDTnet Journal,
then enter "NDTnet Journal"
(no quotes please) into the "Optional Link URL" field, and "NDTnet Journal" in the
"Link Title" field (a title must be entered!). The words "NDTnet Journal" will appear delimited
by a
bullet at the
bottom of your message,
in the color your browser uses to indicate an active link. Clicking on
"NDTnet Journal"
will link to http://www.ndt.net.
- Optional Image URL:
- Filling in this field with a URL pointing
to an
image
will cause this image to be displayed at the start of your message.
We recommend not to use image files that are too big (<10KB), because
they take a long time to load and your reader may get impatient!
- If you don't have an URL (server) to attach your files to, you can use our FTP server:
-
You will need a software program to do an ftp transfer to
ftp://www.ndt.net/pub/incoming/. Use "anonymous" as your user name and use
your email address as the password, after you logged in enter to the incoming path. Please make sure the filename you want
to use doesn't already exist on our server - avoid obvious names like
"ultrasonic.htm".
Finally you enter your attachment
URL into the form "http://www.ndt.net/wshop/ftp/filename.suffix".
Finally, HTML commands can be incorporated within the body of a message.
If
you don't know
what these are, don't worry about it.
How do I reply to a message?
Select a message from the forum page you want to reply to, whether to
answer an initial message or follow up to someone else's reply,
either you want to reply to the initial message or follow up to someone
else's reply,
simply click on this message.
Now the message you want to reply to will appear. Use the form appended
to the bottom of the
message that you want to reply to - just like it says in How do I post a message?.
The message list for each forum shows messages
that are replies to previous messages indented beneath the message
which
they are
replying to. Make sure when you reply that your browser is displaying
the
actual
message that you want to reply to. One thing that may be a little
confusing
is that
the most recent messages, as well as most recent replies to a
particular
message, are
listed first. Although this may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, we
think
that this
is actually a convenient way to organize messages, and in any event is
the
only method
available with wwwboard.
If you don't see your URL links at the bottom of your message, or don't
see
your
message in the message list, it is because your browser is displaying a
cached
version of the particular page you are looking at. You need to
reload
the page to see the updated message and/or list.
Can I put html tags anywhere in my posts?
No. You can not use HTML tags in any field except in the body of the
message.
The maintainer of the script has the option of allowing or
disallowing any HTML in the Message part of your posting. If
they disallow it, the script will just throw out everything in
<>'s. If they allow it, your html markup will appear in
the posting. It can't hurt to try.
Why are there colons in the message when I try to post a
follow up?
Colons appear in the message dialog box when you try to followup up up on a
message to indicate that those lines are quoting the previous document.
You can delete all lines, however not the subject title
Why didn't my post show up?
Your post most likely did not show up, because your browser did not
reload the
page, it simply pulled it out of cache. Please reload your browser and
it
should then appear.
Where can I get the original scripts that this program is
based on?
This program was modifieded for NDTnet by Teut.Net.
The
original scripts are written in Perl and created by Matt Wright.
They are
free to anyone who wishes to use them and you can get them as well as
other
scripts at: http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/.
Enjoy!
© Copyright NDTnet, rd@ndt.net