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. On the menu below the group's name, you should see a link marked Discussion.

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

Under Topic, you can see the existing topics that people are talking about. This discussion has twelve topics. 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 clicking the Create New Topic button, which will expand a form that looks like this:

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.

Post a Discussion Topic by Email

You can create a new topic by sending an email to the address assigned to that group's discussion forum. To get that email address, visit the group’s discussion forum and click on the “Create New Topic” button. 

Click on the link beside “Did you know you can post new topics to this group from your email client?”  and another text box will appear, which will provide the email address that you can use to post new topics by email. 

The message must be sent from the email account associated with your Humanities Commons account. The subject of the email will become the title of the discussion topic. 

Reply to a Discussion by Email

You can post a reply to a discussion forum thread by replying to the email notification, as long as you are subscribed to receive “all email” from that group. You can change your email settings on the group page, under Email Options, or from My Groups in the groups directory. For more information, see the group notifications guide.