From the Editor

About the STC Houston Forum

by Rebecca Taylor, Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett-Packard

This summer, the STC Houston web team implemented a brand-new online resource for the chapter: the STC Houston Forum. This new tool replaces the old Job Board, and Steve Shriver has been posting new job postings regularly. But the forum covers so much more than employment topics! Use this forum, instead of the chapter mailing list, to post questions about technical communication topics. Since this is a new tool for our chapter, I wanted to provide some background on what a forum is and some of its benefits.

Forum Primer

The STC Houston Forum is an online bulletin board. Think of it as a web version of a discussion e-mail list. Are you new to the lingo of a board? Here are a few terms and definitions:

Category—a group of forums that are related to a single theme. A category contains forums.

Forum—a focus subject within a category. A forum contains topics.

Topic—a specific subject within a forum. Also known as Threads. Think of a topic as the equivalent of what you would send to an e-mail discussion list. Topics contain posts.

Post—a submission or reply to a topic or thread.

Moderator—A board user who patrols the forums to ensure that other users are not violating the rules of the board.

Features of the Forum

The STC Houston Forum has some great features:

graphical user interface
search engine for a certain topic or all topics
e-mail notice when someone replies to one of your postings
threaded conversations (meaning all posts for a specific topic are grouped together)

So what are you waiting for? Go visit the STC Houston Forum at forum.stc-houston.org!

To learn more about the STC Houston Forum, go to the Rules & Tips forum in the STC Houston Forum Info category. Or, you can click the FAQ link at the top of every Forum page.