Accessing the Forums
Forums can be a great resource for just about any subject you care to name. Interested in cats, Cadillacs, cheese, computers or Microsoft Word? You’re not alone, and there’s a forum out there where like-minded people are discussing those very topics!
The ability to have your thoughts instantly and completely understood by people just like you, who spend all day doing exactly what you are trying to do, brings a sense of unbelievable "Oh, YES!!! At LAST! Someone who UNDERSTANDS how I feel!" Try it: it's worth it...
You know how they say "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a cat"? That's true: but you also don't know if they might be a university professor teaching the subject at a world-renowned university, or an industry professional with 40 years of practical experience doing what you are trying to do right now. In the Microsoft Word Mac forums, we have several of each among the MVPs.
How to Reach Us
Click here: http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Word/
Yes, you will need to sign up for an account. Sorry about that: they held out as long as possible, but eventually the spammers and trolls wore us all down. They had to make everyone sign up for an "account" so that the account (and anything it posted) can be deleted if they do the wrong thing!
Fighting Spam
Forums are a boon for spammers (and virus writers!) looking to harvest email addresses to spread their ubiquitous garbage. The forum automatically obfuscates your email address so spammers can't harvest it.
If you want someone to email you, you need to post your email address in clear text. Obviously, you should obfuscate it, or you will get deluged with offers to enhance body parts you may not even have! A popular method is to show your email as "myname at mydomain dot com". Humans can read it easily, the address-harvesting robots will normally give it a miss (not least because Microsoft prevents them connecting). Of course, you can make it more complicated than that: you get the idea.
If you do decide to post to the forums from a dummy email address, don’t forget to sign your name (a first name will do) at the bottom of your message. If you end up posting several questions or follow-ups, it will make you more memorable and possibly get you a better answer. Besides, it’s the courteous thing to do!
These days, it's recommended (by Apple!) to run an AntiVirus or content filter of some type if you are going to surf any part of the Internet. Forums are safer than most places because the format is almost always plain text, which does not enable nasties to hide in it. But forums are HTML, and various bits of malware will get you, if your Mac is unprotected.
Netiquette
You’ll get the best results on forums if you compose your posts according to a simple set of guidelines and keep common courtesy in mind at all times. Here are some points to keep in mind ...
My Top 10...
- Always reply to the forum and not privately to the individual unless invited to do so!
- When posting about computer software, always give your operating system and application version numbers (if you forget, we probably won't be able to help you at all!). Also note if you have updated your software and to what levels.
- Make your Subject heading descriptive of your question. “Help!!!” is not a useful title and will probably get your post ignored.
- Make a separate post for each unrelated question and title it appropriately.
- Maintain the “thread” (chain of related posts) by hitting “Reply to Forum”. Don’t start a new thread to reply to an existing post and don’t change the Subject (title) unless you have good reason to. If you change the Subject, you will “break the thread” so people can't keep up with the developing story.
- If a discussion changes topic mid-thread, as often happens, then please do change the thread’s Subject appropriately. Example: Unicode Fonts [was “Re: Change my default font”].
- Always quote back at least the most relevant part of the post that you are replying to, for reference; but delete lengthy, unnecessary portions.
- When quoting back an entire thread, edit out extraneous sections of previous posts.
- The server won’t accept attachments (people were trying to spread bad things that way). Instead, post the attachment to a web server if you can, and include a link to it in your message. Be aware that many people won't risk downloading an attachment from someone they don't know, so try to do without it. Use your words :-)
- Avoid cross-posting (addressing your post to more than one forum) whenever possible. If you really believe it’s necessary, at least note at the top of your message that you have done so. Example: Cross-posted to the MacWord and Outlook forums. Avoid multi-posting (sending the same or similar posts with each one addressed to a different forum) altogether.
A Last Word...
Dare I bring up the subject of top-posting vs. bottom-posting? Sure, why not.
The dyed-in-the-wool bottom-poster will insist that reading from the top of a page to the bottom is the natural thing to do and therefore your reply should always be at the bottom (and besides that, he would say, it’s the traditional way to do it).
His dyed-in-the-wool opposite would insist that it makes more sense to put your reply at the top of the page because then the reader doesn’t have to scroll endlessly to the bottom to find your reply (and besides that, she would say, you often don’t need to reference the history of the thread, so why make someone scroll past it; yet it’s there if you need it).
Here are my own rules of thumb (and I only break them once in a while): If a thread is already trending downwards as a result of previous bottom-posting, then follow suit by bottom-posting; if a thread is already trending upwards as a result of previous top-posting, then – guess what? – follow suit by top-posting. If you’re responding only to the last post in a thread and the rest of it is irrelevant, delete all but the single relevant post and then reply whichever way you prefer! Ditto if you’re the first responder to a post.
Finally, it is always appropriate to post in-line by inserting multiple replies into a post in response to specific points, providing that you trim unnecessary text from previous posts.
See you on the forums!