Below are some guidelines on how to create forum entries on the Link Technologies support site. These guidelines are required to keep the entries consistent and make it easy for people to search for solutions.

Summary of Steps:

1. Forum: You should place all General items in the General forum and all product specific items in the Products forum
2. Subject: The subject should clearly explain the entry. Note that the subject is the topic not the title of the entry. The difference between the topic and title is that the topic explains in more detail what the paragraph is about.
3. Body: Each forum entry should have these sections:
   1. Introduction, Background or Abstract - This is a short paragraph introducing the need for this entry or what all this hu ha is about. Usually readers will decide to read further after reading this part.
   2. Summary - Brief summarise the entry, usually experts will only need to read up to this section to understand what this is about
   3. Detailed body - This is where you break down the summary section and put screenshots and all the details required for a novice user to follow
   4. End Note - It is a good idea to place references to other manuals, links or anything that may help the reader with more information on the subject

Important notes:

1. Keep your color scheme, fonts and figures consistent
2. All figures and tables should have a sub-title with a brief description at the bottom of the figure. e.g. Figure 1 - Chart showing sales trend for the 12 month period
3. Pictures should be sized with maximum width 680px in order to display correctly. Length does not matter, however image size is important for good browser response. try to keep the images under 100kb. Once you have created your entry, verify the entry using Internet Explorer and Google chrome.
4. Images should be placed in the documents folder. There is a subfolder for each product as well as a MISC folder for any images or attachments that do not relate to a specific product. Do not place images in the root folder (I have removed write access to the root folder but some of you may have administrator access)
5. Spelling, sentence construction and grammar should be checked throughly. You have the ability to edit your own posts so please ask for peer review and edit your entries to make corrections
6. Use screenshots where possible as this helps the reader understand better

Below are some details that explain the above items:
Uploading an image:
You can upload an image using the Image button (shown below tagged as 1) of this editor. Figure 1 below shows how to do this:
Figure 1: How to uplaod an image to forum posts

Next you choose where to upload your image. This is shown in figure 2 below:

Figure 2: Where to place images that you need to upload

Place all images in the subfolders (3) of the documents (2) folder. Use the appropriate directory. You can create subdirectories if you have a large number of images to upload.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Name your images clearly. Include Figure number in the image name so you can identify them correctly.

You then need to make sure that the image is no wider then 680px. Smaller images do not need to be re-sized. To resize, you need to follow these steps:


Figure 3: Resizing the image option

Right click on the image. Then select Properties (shown in 3 above)


Figure 1: Reducing the image width

If the image size is greater than 680px, reduce this to 680px. Then select the OK button.


-- End of post ---