Our website's Forums are based on software that's become a little outdated (we're working on that!), but they are still the best facility we have for general communications between our members. The purpose of this page is to offer some tips to help us use them more effectively.

The Forums

The intended purpose of most of the forums is evident from the forum title, but one of the forums could use a bit of explanation. The following forums are visible to the public, although you must be an LVAAS member and logged in to the site in order to post a message:

• Public Events - Everybody Welcome !
• LVAAS News - Get up to the minute information
• What's Hot in the Night Sky!
• General Astronomy Topics
• Astrophotography
• All Astronomy and Cosmology Topics
• Polar Alignment Discussions
• South Mountain
• Pulpit Rock
• Telescopes, Eyepieces, Mounts, Heaters and other Equipment
• Software
• Radio Telescopes
• FOR SALE - Telescopes, Accessories, Books, Videos and More!

Here are the forums that are only visible to members:

• Are you going to Pulpit Rock? (*)
• ONLINE POLLS - Please vote !!
• The LVAAS Suggestion Box and Website Feedback
• Board Issues
• Light Pollution
• Officer Elections

(*) The "Are you going to Pulpit Rock?" forum was created to give members a safe place to discuss plans to visit PR, without advertising them to the general public.

Notifications and Syndication

With the amount of competition for our online attention, nobody needs yet another URL to check on a regular basis to see if there are any new postings. There are a couple of different ways that you set up to find out about forum postings without having to constantly check for them.

RSS Feeds are an "old-school" technology for distributing regularly updated content, and you can get an RSS feed for "New Forum Posts" under the "Syndication" link on our site. However, RSS does not have any facility for authenticating registered users, so the RSS feed only carries content from the forums that are visible to the public. If you know about RSS and you like to use it, it is available, but it is not particularly recommended for new users.

Email Notifications are a more practical solution that do not suffer from the authentication problem. To use them, you must be a registered user of the web site, with a correct email address in your profile. (You can check this and update it if needed under the "Account Settings" link, found under "My Account" in the title bar menu at the top, or "User Menu" in the left sidebar.

Topic Notifications

When you post a message on a forum, either by creating a new topic or replying to an existing one, you have the option of enabling notifications on the topic. Go this by checking the "Notify me of replies" checkbox found next to "Options:" under the message editing area.

Forum Notifications

If you are interested in a particular forum, you would probably like to be notified when anyone else posts a new topic. Set this up using the "notifications" button under the "new topic" button. (This button used to be an easily-overlooked, un-obvious thumbtack icon, but we have redesigned it.)

When notifications are turned on, a check mark will appear in the box (and you can click it again to turn them off):

The Subscriptions tab

There is a Subscriptions tab on the main Forums page that is supposed to help you manage all of your forum notifications in one place. Sometimes, checking or unchecking a notification option will take you there. The only problem is, it doesn't work right and may not show you all (or any) of your active notifications. Do not rely on it.

Notification User Preferences

There is a "Forum Preferences" tab on the "Account Settings" page where you can control certain notification options.

• "Always Notify" - if this is checked, the "Notify me of replies" checkbox will be checked for you when you post a message.
• "Notify Once Only" - if this is checked, the system will only notify you when a new topic is created, not every time someone replies.
• "Include full post in notification" - if this is checked, the email notification will include the entire message posted.