Time to create your first forum discussion topic:
You just saw how easy it is to create your first forum topic. You gave it a relevant name and description and posted it to the forum. Now all you have to do is wait for people to start responding to you so that you can develop the discussion.
Let's take a brief look at how adding this post has affected the options available to you in the forum. Navigate back to your forum. You can now see the topic that you just created, its description, as well as who posted it. As an administrator you have the option to delete or edit the topic. Normal members do not have this option.
There is also the ability to quickly apply actions to any topic. To do this, check the tick box to the left of the topic box. Then use the Choose an action option box at the top or bottom of the page to select your action. When you have chosen an action, click on Update selected topics. This is a good way of applying changes, such as making topics sticky to more than one topic in your forum. See the following screenshot:
In the preceding Time for action — adding a discussion topic, you also saw that group administrators and forum moderators have two extra options when they are making a new topic. These are to make a topic sticky or closed:
Sticky topics are really useful. Imagine that your forum is now really popular with lots of good advice going into the various posts and topics. This is when it becomes likely that topics start getting replicated and people begin discussing issues that have already been discussed. A good idea would be to create a sticky topic that stays at the top of the forum and brings together all of the topics that are commonly discussed in the forum, linking the user to the correct area of discussion. This means that users won't have to spend a long time searching through all the forums to find the answer they are looking for.
Such a topic could also be made closed. You wouldn't want this topic to be added to by general group users. It could be organized and managed by the group moderator.
Closed topics can be a useful way to get news out to your group members. Since e-mail notifications are sent to group members that are subscribed to a forum in your group, they will receive the updates as you add them. How about posting a weekly news update?
Earlier, we briefly mentioned subscribing users to your forums automatically. This is a useful way of ensuring your group members receive e-mails on important posts. Remember though, group members will also receive notification e-mails when any other replies are made in the forum, so you might want to create a completely separate forum just for news.
To turn on automatic subscription, revisit your forum options and check the Automatically subscribe users? option in the settings of the forum.
Now that you've just created your first forum, let's think a little bit about how you want to name your forums and topics. Each forum in your group should be given a sufficiently general name with the idea being that it will be made up of a number of different topic threads that are all related to it. While the forum titles should be sufficiently general, the topic titles should all be specific and describe exactly what it is that will be spoken about.
For example, one Mahara site may have a group called "Olympics". A good forum title would be "Track and Field", because it is general and covers a wide topic. Then, the "Track and Field" forum could have topics, such as "Not enough funding for UK athletics" or "Which country is the best at track and field?" The topic subjects are more specific and targeted.