The Forum SA:Community portal

The Forum SA consists of various community sections as follows:

Public content

The forum

The forum area is the original core of The Forum SA. The aim is to use the powerful medium of the forum format to ask questions, give answers and opinions and be an information resource on a range of discussion topics called threads.

Most of the content is available for public viewing, but some forums are available for members only.

Blogs

Members who have established some reputation in the forum area and graduated to TFSA Local status may start their own blog in the blog area of The Forum SA. This gives members an opportunity to develop and expand on their own interests or promote their business with advertorial content in their own blog.

There are three distinct advantages in setting up a blog on TFSA compared to the usual blogging options out there:

• free hosting
• no setup and installation steps required (unless you want to customise your blog)
• automatic exposure to the existing traffic of TFSA

Articles

The Forum SA artcles area is aimed at giving a structured layout of article styled posts currently in the forum area. This will allow visitors to drill down to relevant content via a topic directory structure.

If it seems there isn't a lot in there right now, you'd be right. The area is awaiting some final coding updates before being built in earnest.

Wiki

The Forum SA wiki area is aimed at developing useful content pages Wikipedia style, with page content editable by the TFSA community. This is ideal for information where there might be changes in future, or where collaberation might produce a far more useful and informative content page.

Member only content

Personal profiles

Members of The Forum SA may publish more information about themselves and their interests in their personal profile. They may also customise permission settings for some of the personal content they may make available in the member only content ares of the site.

Interest groups

Members may join interest groups and create their own interest group in the interest group area. These are essentially member driven mini forums.

Successful interest groups may be upgraded into the main forum structure if well supported and of reasonable relevance to the business theme of The Forum SA.

Networking and messaging

Members can develop their friends and contacts using the networking tools of The Forum SA. Members can also use the private messaging system of the site to communicate with other members.

Progression

Content to come - "The next step is" guide for new members.