Registration & Login
Registration helps eliminate spam and other nuisance posts. It also allows you to take advantage of all the features offered by IRTalk.com, such as receiving email notification of replies to your posts, tracking post counts, and setting your own avatar. It only takes a few seconds to register, and it is recommended you do so. You may, however, browse the forums and read messages without registering.
To create an account you will need to click the "Join" link in the upper right hand corner of the page, and complete the form for creating a new account. Here you will specify details such as your login name and email address. Your login details and password will be emailed to you after successful registration. This email should be sent within 2 minutes of your registration. If you do not receive your email in a timely manner, please make sure to check your junk/spam box before contacting us!
After successfully registering you should have a username and password. You can then visit the login page and enter your username and password to login.
When logging in if you do not check the ‘Remember Me’ option you will be automatically logged off after 20 minutes of inactivity. If you would like the site to always log you in automatically, please check the ‘Remember Me’ checkbox.
If you forgot your username and/or password you can visit the Forget Your Password page and have both your username and a new password emailed to you by entering the email account you're registered with. You will be sent a new password since we store your password encrypted and have no way of retrieving the original value. Once you receive your username and new password you can login and change your password.
If you’ve registered and can’t login, check to ensure you have a valid username and password. If you are sure the username and password are valid, but still can’t login you may either require account activation or your account may be on hold. In this case it is best to contact the site administrators using the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page.
First check to ensure your username and password are correct. If you still can’t login, please contact the site administrators using the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page.
User Profile & Settings
A profile is information about your account that controls how you view information within IRTalk.com. This includes details about posts you’ve contributed to, personal information you wish to share such as your web address or weblog address, as well as setting that control how you interact with this Community Server site such as: themes, time zone, and many other settings.
Once you have logged in to IRTalk.com (see above), click on your user name in the upper right corner of the page to access your Profile.
Setting your timezone will enable IRTalk.com to display all dates and time relative to your time zone.
A signature is a message that is appended to the end of any posts you make in the forums. You can edit your signature from the profile page. This signature will then appear at the bottom of any messages posted by you.
An avatar is a feature of the forums which allows for an image to be displayed along with your posts. Avatars may be enabled or disabled by your administrator.
When viewing your profile, you will see a tab labeled "Avatar". From here you can complete the form to specify the avatar you wish to use, either uploading an avatar or including a URL to your avatar. You will also need to enable your avatar for it to be displayed with your posts.
The date format used to display any date information can be configured from your profile, in the "Site Options" tab.
You can turn off all email tracking globally from your profile, in the "Email" tab. You may also set notification preferences on a per-forum basis by clicking the "More Options" button at the bottom of each forum. Then, set the "Send Email" pulldown to your desired preference, and click the "Apply" button.
There are many different icons that can show up next to usernames in the forums. Common examples are administrators, moderators, or top posters. Other images may be displayed based on groups the user belongs to.
This is to protect the privacy of users who have shared their information, and to prevent unwanted/offtopic postings.
Privacy & Security
Once logged in you can change your password from your Profile page. See
How do I access my Profile?
Usernames cannot be changed once created.
Once logged in, you can change your private email address from your Profile page.
The only profile setting that is required is your private email address. This is the email address that is used when you subscribe to the forums, when a forgotten username/password is emailed. The private email address is never shared or displayed publicly. The remainder of the profile settings are optional.
You can set the option in your profile and your name will not appear in any member listings, including the listing of who is online.
Navigation
A Forum Group is a top level grouping of related forums. A forum group contains 1 or more forums.
A Forum is a grouping of related threads of discussion. A Forum contains 0 or more threads and 0 or more sub-forums.
A Thread is a grouping of related posts. A Thread contains 1 or more Posts. The first post becomes the Thread and replies to the original post increment details on the Thread, such as the reply count or last post.
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Thread Icon Legend
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Topic with posts you have not read.
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Topic with posts you have read.
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Popular topic with posts you have not read. A topic
becomes popular after a certain number of views and posts (administrator
defined).
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Popular topic with posts you have read. A topic becomes
popular after a certain number of views and posts (administrator
defined).
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Announcement you have not read
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Announcement you have read
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A pinned (or "sticky") topic with posts you have not read. Pinned topics are
displayed before other topics until they become unpinned.
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A pinned (or "sticky") topic with posts you have read. Pinned topics are displayed
before other topics until they become unpinned.
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A pinned (or "sticky") popular topic with posts you have not read. A pinned topic
with enough views or replies to become popular.
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A pinned (or "sticky") popular topic with posts you have read. A pinned topic with
enough views or replies to become popular.
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A locked topic with posts you have not read. Locked topics do not
allow replies.
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A locked topic with posts you have read. Locked topics do not allow
replies.
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A forum may not display any threads if there are no threads in the forum or if filters on the forms have been applied and no threads match the filter. An example of a filter is filtering to display threads newer than a certain date, such as threads new in the past 2 weeks.
The icons next to threads when viewing a forum indicate different status. You can move your mouse cursor over these icons to see what the different status / types of threads are.
An announcement is a special post type that is always displayed at the top of a forum for a configured amount of time. The purpose of an announcement is to increase the visibility of certain topics.
A sticky topic is a special post that causes a post to sort to the top of a forum for a specified amount of time. A sticky topic is similar to an announcement, whereas an announcement is displayed separate from other threads and usually does not allow replies.
A locked thread is a special post that does not allow replies. Once an administrator/moderator locks a thread no more posts are allowed.
Yes, you can sort threads when viewing a forum by Author, Replies, Views, and Last Post. The default sort for a forum is to display the newest threads first (Last Post descending). To sort simply click on the options button at the bottom of the screen and select your desired sort order and click 'Apply'.
The XML icon is linked to the RSS feed for the forum. RSS is used to allow other applications to subscribe to a forum's posts. The latest versions of Internet Explorer and
Firefox have RSS support built in.
This icon indicates the user’s online status. A green icon means the user has been active recently (usually within the last 15 minutes). A red icon means the user has not recently been active. You can hover your mouse over this icon to see details about the user’s past activity.
Posting
Yes and no. You cannot type HTML directly into the editor. If you are using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, the default editor for creating new posts will be a Rich Text Editor that will let you apply styles, as in a word processing program, and format the posts using HTML. If you post with other browsers, a standard textbox is used and BBCode (see below) can be used to mark-up posts.
BBCode is a special syntax for formatting plaintext posts. You may use this if you are unable to use the regular formatting tools. By enclosing text with special "tags", you can change the text style as follows:
- [b]bold[/b]
- [i]italic[/i]
- [u]underline[/u]
You may also post an image as follows (the image must be hosted on another server - you cannot upload to irtalk.com via this method):
- [img]http://www.yourserver.com/path/to/image.ext[/img]
Sites such as
imageshack.us and others provide free, anonymous image hosting.
Yes - when posting a new message, select the tab titled "Attachments & Options", then click the "Add/Update" button to upload your attachment. A list of permitted attachment types will be displayed on the upload form. Maximum size of an attachment is limited to one megabyte.
Emoticons are graphical elements that can be added within the body of a post to add emotions to the post. Common examples are the use of smilies within the contents of a post.
First, you must register for an account and log in to IRTalk.com. When viewing a forum you should see an image button labeled "New Topic". Clicking on this image button will take you to a form for posting a message or ask you to login first.
You can reply to an existing post using either the Reply or Quote image buttons displayed with the post. If you do not see the Reply or Quote image buttons when viewing a post you either do not have permissions to reply or the post may not allow replies.
If you are logged in, you will see an Edit image button next to posts you have made. Clicking on this image button will allow you to edit your post. However,
you are only able to edit posts made within the last 15 minutes.
See
How do I add Signature to my Post? in the User Profile and Settings section.
See
How do I set my Avatar? in the User Profile and Settings section.