Planning Forums 

Use

Forums are evolving, organic structures that require supervision and moderation. However, a little initial planning means that you spend less time on administration and maintenance later on.

Before you create forums, we recommend that you plan the general forum structure and the permissions for accessing forum functions. This is especially true if you anticipate a large number of active forum users.

Procedure

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       1.      Plan the initial hierarchy of forums.

More information: Forum Content Hierarchy

       2.      Remember that forum users are portal users and think of the portal roles needed to control the access of users and groups to forum iViews.

More information: Forum Users

       3.      Estimate how many system administrators and moderators you need for the number of categories and forums you are planning and think of the permissions that might be appropriate for administrators, moderators, and users.

More information: Permission Concept for Forums

       4.      Acquaint yourself with the architecture of a forums system.

More information: Forums System Architecture

       5.      Think about the policies you might wish to enforce.

More information:

Setting the Global Read Tracking Policy

Setting the Posted Messages Editing Policy

Defining the Message Attachment Policy

Result

Planning this information in advance makes the initial setup smoother. You can use the Admin Console to carry out most of the other configuration steps once you are up and running.