How to Use the Brandywine Special Needs PTA Forum

Unfortuneately, this website was hit hard with automated postings for medicines, porn and stock offerings - the same knd of things that comes in as SPAM into email boxes. We just couldn't keep up with deleting the junk so we had to remove the ability for visitors to post comments. If you have comments or questions, please use the "About Us" page off the main site to obtain contact information.

Welcome to the virtual meeting place for the Brandywine Special Needs PTA. Here, visitors to the site can get information, ask questions, make comments and provide help to others.

This page of Brandywine Special Needs PTA web site is a designed to provide a way for our community to share information, ideas and stories to help our kids. Anyone is welcome to read and contribute. Many visitors may be able to fake their way through, but we've wanted to include some basic instructions below.

Stories versus Forums
There are two main sections of this page. The Stories and Articles section is arranged by topic and is accessed from the upper left side of the main page. The Stories and Articles section is the archive portion of our site. Over time, we envision this section growing to contain lots of information we hope site visitors will find useful. While it is possible add comments to these Stories and Articles, the real interactive portion of this page is the Forum section.

The Forum section is accessed from the upper right side of the main page. This section is also arranged by topic but the topics and the postings are much more dynamic. This is the section where visitors post questions and provide feedback to others. The Forum section is like an ongoing conversation with a group of people around a table while the Stories and Articles section is more like reading a magazine.

What's in a Name
To help keep things organized, we'd prefer you sign up for a free, optional username. It is easy, fast and automatic. Having a username helps other visitors follow your threads by associating various postings together with a common username. All you need to do is select your own username and provide an email address. The username does not need to your real name or link back to you in any way. The email address you supply is private and not provided to other visitors unless you explicitily change your profile to show that address. Additionally, you can allow or deny vistors the ability to send emails to your username. By default, visitors can send you a private email in response to your question or comment but never know your actual email address. Optionally, you can change your profile to make your email address and other information about yourself visible to visitors. Creating a username also lets you "subscribe" to Forums so you can automatically receive emails on topics you find interesting.

Setting up Your Account
To set up a new account, click on the New User link to the left. This will automatically create an ID and email a secure password to whatever email account you provided. That password should be delivered within a few minutes of your request. Using the username you chose and the initial password from the email, you can log onto the site. The left side of the webpage provides most your navigation around this page, including access to options for your account. One of the first things you will probably want to do is to change your initial password to something meaningful to you. To access options for your account, click on the Account Information link on the left side of the page under the User Functions heading.

To associate a name with your account, simply enter that name in the Full Name field of the Account Information page. Additonal information, anonymous or otherwise, can be entered into the Bio field on the Account Information page.

If you want to change the default setup and prevent other visitors from sending emails to you, you can click on Preferences under the Functions heading. From there, remove the check from the Email from Users option box.

Reading Stories and Posting Comments
To read a story, click on the topic that interests you under the Stories and Articles heading on the upper left side of the page. The way this site is set up, anyone - including anonymous vistors, can immediately read everything and post comments to existing entries. However, if you want to post an original entry for the Stories and Articles section, the entry is first submitted and then "approved" by one of the site moderators before it is posted. These rules may change over time, but that is how we are starting out. Feel free to comment on this or any other aspect of the site.

To contribute a new item for the Stories and Articles section, click on the Contribute menu link on the top of the web page. After you have written the story and clicked on the Submit button, the story will be stored in a private area of the site until it is approved and posted by one of the site moderators. It is also possible to upload files from the User Functions section on the lower left side of the page. These files may be part of a submission or the submission itself. Once a moderator has posted your submission, you'll be sent an email letting you know.

Reading Forums and Posting Comments
To see a listing of Forum topics click on the link on upper right side of the page. From here, you will find the high level Forum catagories. Click on a Forum and you can see the topics within that Forum and then click on the topic to see the postings that make up the virtual conversation on the topic. Check it out, it is much simplier than it sounds.

Posting a reply into an existing Forum entry is easy. Just click on the "postreply" button at the bottom of the entry. In order to save a posting, you need to fill in the Author field at the top of the posting form. If you have signed on a user, this field is automatically filled in. If you did not sign on with a valid user name, you still need to include something in this field - if you don't you will receive an error and the posting won't be saved. If you want to start a new topic, click on the "newtopic" button - pretty tough, huh?

Forum Subscriptions
The Forums have a feature called "subscriptions" which allow you to sign up for automatic email notifications whenever someone makes a post to that Forum. It is easy to add or remove yourself from subscriptions so don't worry about getting lots of "junkmail". Give it a try and see how you like it. To subscribe to a Forum, click on the Forum topics link on upper right side of the page. From there, pick a Forum and then select "Track this Forum" along the upper right side of the Forum entry. To unsubscribe from a Forum, click on the Forum Features item on under the User Functions section on the bottom left of the page and then click on the Subscriptions menu item.

General questions or comments can be sent to webmaster@bsnpta.org.