Discussion forum is located in the Communication portion of every class website. Now, the discussion forum is broken down into a series of categories. And categories you can think of as high-level folders that contain different kinds of content. So there might be categories around course administration, there might be categories around specific weeks in the class, or specific activities in the class. As you can see here, in this class, there are categories broken down by individual weeks. 

And you can have categories that are private, so that only individual faculty or TAs or students can see them. And some categories have restrictions on them, so that you have to do something or there's some kind of restriction on there. For example, normally you can edit your posts in a discussion forum for an unlimited amount of time. But the faculty might want to set it up so that you only have 15 minutes to edit your post before it's a final post there. That would be indicated on the main category page. 

And you can see, in this category here, under Week Eight Discussion Forum, there's a blue icon-- sorry, green icon that says PBV, as in Post Before View. And this means that you cannot see the content of that category until you actually post something in that category. So categories, again, are high-level folders that contain lots of content. 

So stepping down from categories, the next thing you have in the discussion forum is a topic. Is a topic. And a topic is where you'll spend most of your time reading and communicating with others in your class. So if you click on a topic, this is where the individual faculty or student messages are kept. If you click on a topic, it brings up the topic display for that particular topic, which we'll take a look at now. 

So the topic itself is displayed as a title up at the top of the topic. And there's an original post by the person who posted there. And you can read down the topic, and you can see all of the responses from students in the class. Now, if there's a particular post that you really like a lot and you want to refer to at a later time, you can click the star button and bookmark that post for later review. 

Now, on the left-hand side of every topic is a navigation bar that shows you all of the topics in a category and all the categories in your discussion forum. And if there are messages that you have not read yet in that category, you will see that there is a New icon next to the message there, indicating that you haven't-- there are messages in that category you have not yet read. And within the category, if there are new messages that you haven't seen, again, you'll also see the New icon next to each individual message that is in that particular topic. 

Now, if you want to just sort of get an email about every post that is done in a topic, you can click to the Subscribe link up at the top of each topic, at the very top of each topic. And you will get an email copy of every new post that is put in that topic. Now, if you want to reply to a topic, well, you could just scroll down to the bottom of that topic, and then type your reply in the box at the bottom of the screen. 

Now, if you want to insert a file, you can do that by clicking on the Browse button next to Attach File. And you can add a file to your post. There are tools inside the Rich Text Editor that allow you to upload or insert an image there. And there is even a little Scratchpad tool that allows you to draw things, maybe equations or something like that, and have them inserted into your reply to that topic. 

Now, when you reply in this mechanism, your reply is added to the end of the topic. But what if you want to reply to a specific message? Well, you go to the message that you want to reply to, and you click on the small Reply link immediately below and to the right of that message. And clicking on that brings up the same Rich Text Editor. And if you click Reply and post your reply there, it will appear immediately underneath the post that you wanted to reply to. 

Now, you'll also notice that sometimes there are little icons under some of the posts here, smiley faces or little explosion icons. These are emoji reactions that you can add to any post. And you can do this instead of just saying I agree or I like that. You can use emoji to react to individual posts there. And you do that by clicking on the Plus button that's at the bottom of every single post in a topic. And clicking on that brings up the nine different emoji reactions you can use instead of leaving a direct reply. 

So those are the basics of using the discussion forum. At the top level, you have categories. And then you have topics. And that's where you'll do your posts and interact with other students, is in the topic there. I do want to point out something called My Discussion Forum, because this provides some useful and powerful options that you have for customizing your discussion forum experience. 

Now, the My Discussion Forum tool will show you a couple of different things. First of all, it will show you all new messages since your last visit. So you can see at the very top here all the messages since your last visit. So if you just want to see the new posts since the last time you made it to the discussion forum, you can do that in the My Discussion Forum view under New Posts Since Last Visit. You can also see any direct replies to your posts that you have made. And you can also see a list of the posts that you yourself have made within that discussion forum. 

Now, keep in mind that, if you are looking at the All New Posts Since My Last Visit view in My Discussion Forum, those posts will still show up as New on the actual topics unless you click this link that says Mark All New Posts in This Topic as Read. And once you do that, those posts will not show up as New because you may have already read them on this page here. 

And finally, there are some view, subscribe options available to you in the discussion forum, as well. Now, these options allow you to do things like always start on the My Discussion Forum page. Some people really like that. Hide read topics. If you've already read a topic, maybe you don't want to read it anymore. And this page also allows you to control delivery options for subscriptions. 

You can either get-- if you subscribe to topics or subscribe to categories, you can either get individual emails as posts are added so that you get them immediately, or you can get a digest email of posts added to categories and topics just once per day. And that's very useful for those of you who don't want lots of messages coming out of the discussion forum. And also on this page you can manage subscriptions to either whole categories or individual topics, turning them on or off at this level. And that is the discussion forum in a nutshell.