Using the forums

We suggest that you first visit the forums and look at what has been posted recently. Then decide whether you want to receive copies of the updates to any of the forums regularly by email and subscribe to those. Afterwards you may choose to suspend your subscription temporarily whilst cruising and catch up afterwards via the web record. The choice is yours.

To go to the forums, click on Forums either on MyCA or the main part of cruising.org.uk. You will see the current forums under up to four headings: Members' Forums, Help, Committees, Groups (though you will only see the latter two if you are a member of some committee). You can select any of the forums under one of these headings and you will see the topics, as for Cruising Conversations below:

Each of the topics seen here may have any number of replies from other members, and you can see the author of the original and the number of times each has been viewed, together with the date and author of the most recent response. They are listed in reverse order of the most recent contribution. Clicking on any of the topics will take you to all the posts, starting with the first. If you want to go immediately to the most recent post in a topic click on the next to the topic.

Another way of getting directly to these topics is from the right hand column of MyCA where the most recent topics are often posted. In this case the down arrow next to the topic will take you straight to the most recent post.

You may notice several things about the picture above. It's impossible to get all the past topics on the screen, so you can also click on past pages. Above the main box is a trail which gives links up to the top of the tree wherever you are. You can also post a new topic by clicking on the button so marked. Finally, the first topic is marked "sticky" - meaning that it won't go down the list as all other topics do over time. It is usually a word of welcome or advice from an administrator.

When you click on one of the topics, you will see a display such as that below:

The author's picture is set in their "profile" or account - you can set yours in your account. If you want to send a private email to them, click on the "email" button. If you want to reply to the post, quoting something they have said, click on the Quote link at the top right. If you do this, please trim what you quote to the minimum possible. It gets tedious to see every post repeated, maybe several times. Otherwise you can simply reply by hitting Post Reply.

Making a Post

When you click on New Topic you will get a box to put your post in as follows:

At the simplest, you can type your message into the box, in a very similar way to writing an email. The only buttons you may be interested in are B I and U which turn any text you have selected into Bold, Italic or Underlined respectively. You can ignore the reference to BBCode unless you are technically inclined. It is yet another markup language. We apologize that it is different to that used in the main part of MyCA.

When you have finished, it is worth pressing the Preview button below the box to see what your post really will look like before pressing Submit to present it to the forum.

On some of the forums, mainly those for the committees, there is underneath the main edit box a button marked "Add an attachment". If you click on this, the window will be refreshed and underneath will appear a box marked "Filename" with a button marked Browse opposite it. If you click on this you will be able to select an attachment for your message from your own computer to pass on with the message. This might be a word or pdf file, for example. When you have selected the file, click on Add Attachment to add the file to your post.