Changing your account settings

Once you have registered with the CAPA site, you can change settings to control information about yourself and also your use and experience of this site. To see what changes you can make to your account, log in and then click on my account in the navigation block on the left side of the page. Click on the edit tab.

Account Settings

Password
Enter in a new password in both fields to set it. The CAPA site sends you a default password that is often hard to remember, so it is recommended that you change your password to something you can easily remember.

Signature
If comments are enabled, you will be able to set a default signature. This will be copied into new comments for you automatically, but may still be edited.

Time zone
Your site administrator may allow users to set their time zone. This will cause all dated content on the site to display in local time, according to the offset you enter here.

Constituent Information

Add information about yourself and your postgraduate education program.

What are Groups

Community members often want to self organize or spontaneously organize around a topic of interest. Allowing communities to organize naturally is important part of a healthy community.

Participants can join groups that are of interest to them and post discussion topics for others to comment on.

A group is created by a single group owner, who has special permissions including the ability to delete the group the owner created. Group administrators also have special permissions but can not delete the group unless they are assigned to be the group owner.

Group subscribers communicate amongst themselves using the group home page as a focal point. They do so by posting discussion topics and other content types. A block is shown on the group home page that links to these group specific posts and actions. The block also provides summary information about the group.

Groups may be selective or not. Selective groups require approval by the group administrator in order to become a member. Groups also support private groups which will not be displayed in a list of organic groups.

Creating new content

Once you have logged-in, you're ready to start posting content.

At the top of your personal menu, you'll find a link called "create content". Click this link and you'll see a list of the types of content you can create. This list reflects the privileges assigned to your user account.

Editing and deleting content

To edit or delete existing content, log in and then bring up the page you wish to edit. Look on the page for an "edit" tab. Depending on your user permissions, you might see this on all pages or only on certain ones (e.g., those that you yourself submitted).

Clicking the edit tab will bring up a page with a form for changing the page. Here you can change the text and settings. Once you have the text and settings in a suitable form, click on the "Submit" button on the bottom of the form. Note that certain sites may be set up to require you to "Preview" the page before you can submit your changes.

If you wish to delete the page (and you have appropriate permissions), click on the "delete" button near the bottom of the form. You'll get a second chance to confirm that you wish to delete the page--or to change your mind!

Categories and terms

Content on this website can be organized using categories through a system called "taxonomy". A taxonomy has different "terms" that are used as categories for content. When you're adding content, you might find a drop-down list of topics. By selecting one, you choose where on the site to categorize your content. If this seems hard to relate to, you can think of topics as being like folders on your hard drive--they help to organize content, so that you can find similar things in the same place.

Comments

Comments allow users to interact with the content on a site, to respond to a message posted to a group, offer their own ideas, make additions, or supply a critique.

Leaving comments

When you bring up a message to read, look for comment-related links at the bottom of the article. If you're not logged in, this might read "login or register to post comments". When you do log in, you should see something like "Add new comment". Click on the link and you're ready to comment away.

Etiquette

Comments can be a great way of enriching a community site--but they can also lead to unfriendly, even harassing exchanges. As with any communication, it's important to try to ensure that your comments are respectful and constructive.

"Threaded" comments

Comments on this web-site are "threaded". This means you can comment directly on a message--or you can reply to an existing comment. If you reply, your comment will be indented to show that it is part of that discussion.

Using RSS

This site uses RSS to allow participants to easily keep up to date on changes to the site.

If you see this icon:

This indicates that this content is available as an RSS feed, the link that this icon points to is the URL of the RSS feed.

Note: Since this is a private site you will need to authenticate your rss feeds in your news reader using your login name and password.

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Users of RSS content use programs called feed 'readers' or 'aggregators': the user 'subscribes' to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards:

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".

These are some recommend RSS readers.

Windows PC:

Sharp Reader
http://www.sharpreader.net

Feed Demon
http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdID=FeedDemon

AmphetaDesk
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/

Mac OS:

Net News Wire
http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdID=NetNewsWire

AmphetaDesk
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/

Linux:

Straw
http://www.gnome.org/projects/straw/

FireFox and Safari have built-in RSS readers that are an option for users too.

<- Some content on this page is courtesy of Wikipedia ->