Discussions
Discussions enable Group members to discuss topics of interest with each other. While email is generally one-to-one communication and announcements are one-to-many, Discussions allow many-to-many communication and interaction for Group members.
Accessing Discussions
Your Group admin will generally place Discussions on your Group home page for easy viewing. However the number of discussion topics on the homepage may be limited, so to view all discussions, select Discussions on the Features tab.
To view an individual Discussion, with related comments click on the Discussion subject.
On the home page the most recent Discussion, or the Discussion with the most recent comment is displayed first, followed by the next most recent, etc. This means an older Discussion might jump to the top of the list if someone adds a comment to it, making it easy to keep track of the most recent activity. On the page displaying all Discussions (from the Features tab), you'll see the most recent at the top, followed by the next-most-recent, etc., regardless of when comments were added.
You can specify how many discussions will be displayed on the Group home page. Click the Settings tab and select Home Page Layout. Enter a value in the Number of discussions to show entry. If you do not enter a value then all discussions will be displayed on the home page.
Creating a New Discussion
Click the Features tab, click Discussions, then click the New Discussion button. Fill in the title and enter the text of the new discussion topic. You can do this in plain text or in HTML. Click Save and your Group members will see the new discussion.
Commenting in a Discussion
Hover over the discussion title and click Add Comment, enter your comment and click Save.
Deleting Topics
As the number of discussions grows and some become out of date you may want to remove items periodically. To do this, hover over the discussion title and select Delete Discussion. Note that when you delete a discussion you also delete all comments for that discussion.
Discussions can be deleted by the Group admin or by the author of the discussion.