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Using Group Discussions

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Group discussions are a great place to participate in conversations. If you click on the name of a group you belong to, you’ll be taken to the group home page. At the top of the left-hand menu on the home page, you should see a link marked Discussion:

Here’s how a typical discussion might look on the Commons:

Screen Shot 2016-10-25 at 5.43.51 PM

Under Topic, you can see the existing topics that people are talking about. Topics are organized by date, the most recently changed or created post appearing at the top of the list. Discussions with many topics are split into pages for ease of navigation.

Writing in Discussions

You can create a new topic by selecting the Create New Topic button at the top if the page. This will take you to an editor box , which looks like this:

Screen Shot 2016-10-25 at 5.45.28 PM

You’ll need to give your topic a title, and then add your first post. When you’re done, click Submit at the bottom of the page, and you have a new topic.

One other thing you’ll notice in the screenshot above: there’s a drop-down box at the bottom left labeled Topic Type. You’ll only see this if you’re a group administrator. But if you have this, you can choose to make a topic sticky. That means it always appears at the top of the list of topics, even if something newer has been posted. You might use this for administrative topics.