Forum Tips & Tricks

[danp]

The Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association uses the forum software "vBulletin" by JelSoft. It's an extremely flexible and infinitely configurable piece of software that gives us many many features to work with. The downside of this is that not even I know every single one of them and I'm sure most of you know even less!

So my goal here today is to introduce you to some of the more interesting features that will help save you time and get the most out of your experience using our discussion forum.

New Posts

Now, this one is probably a little more obvious than some of the others but I feel I need to mention it for the simple reason that it will make it much easier to find updated threads since your last visit.

If you look to the forum header and navigation bar you'll notice a blue bar of links starting with "User CP" and continuing a long. Towards the middle there is one called "New Posts". This link does exactly what it says, and shows you all new posts since your last visit. No more need to wade through each individual forum and all of the threads that haven't been updated anymore!

Also, once you've read all the ones you wanted you can find the "Quick Links" item in the same navigation bar and click the "Mark Forums Read" item to mark everything as read for your next visit.

Subscriptions

Often times I post a reply to a thread and later decide I have something to add, the problem being I can't remember the exact title of the thread or what forum it was posted in. Other times I'd like to be notified if someone replies to a thread I am participating in for quick responses. Thankfully for me vBulletin offers a subscription system!

Subscriptions are pretty simple. If you choose you can subscribe to a thread at the time you are posting/replying to it.



Your choices of subscription are pretty simple. Either don't subscribe, subscribe with no notification of updates, or subscribe and receive email updates either instantly or regularly. Additionally you can set your default subscription type by visiting your User Control Panel > Edit Options and changing it in the "Messaging and Notification" section.

Once subscribed to a thread it will be saved to your subscription folder which can be accessed one of two ways. If you would like to see a quick summary of your recent subscriptions you can visit your User Control Panel which shows threads you subscribed to in the past few days. If you would like to see a full list of all threads you have subscribed to you can do so by visiting the Subscriptions section. From here you can see all threads you've subscribed to, unsubscribe from threads, change your notification type for threads and even organize them into various folders if you want to be particularly organized.

All in all subscriptions are a great way to keep on top of the topics that are important to you.

Searching For Local Members

Really this section should just be titled "Searching For Members" but I think the main use of this would be to find people local to you who you need to notify about an important event or just to find a local person to hit the range with.

In the blue forum navigation bar you'll see an item called "Members List" if you follow this link you will be given a list of all members of the forum and some information about them such as their user picture and where they're from. Additionally you'll be able to view users based on the first letter of their username. All in all this page is not very impressive or much good for finding specific information. That however is where the advanced member search comes in.

If you look towards the top right corner of the Member List table you'll see an item that says "Search Members" that when clicked brings up a drop-down with a search box in it and a link to the "Advanced Member Search". From this not-so-easy-to-find page we have many, many options for finding other members including by username, post count, join date, last post date, location, contact information and more.

For example if we wanted to find all members in Allegheny County one could simply select it from the county drop-down and hit search.

Conclusion

I wanted to close out this article by saying that this is no where near the end of all the cool features available to you and I will continue to add to this article as I think of more cool things to share.

Thanks for signing up for the forums!

[jdlv4_0]

Also, never underestimate the power of the search tool, before making a post, you can use the search tool, it's possible that if you have a question the search option may be a quicker answer than waiting for a reply to a question.

Also when posting please run a search on your topic so you can see if it's all ready beeen adressed, that way you can add your post where there is all ready a thread running and will keep the forum less cluttered.

[phillyd2]

I for one did not know of or notice the "New Posts" option. Nice!