Introduction
General technical information on how to create topics and respond are covered in the user-guide. This is topic is a best practice guide for creating and interacting with topics on the ACCESS-Hive.
Creating a topic
Before creating a topic make sure to search to see if this has already been covered in an existing topic.
Take care to choose a category that is most appropriate to your topic. The categories are mostly aligned with working-groups, but there is always some fuzziness where categories overlap. If you are unsure look at the topics that already in a category to get an idea of what topics are appropriate. It is possible to change the category at a later date, so don’t worry about it too much.
Responding to a topic
When responding to a topic please take care to read it, and all responses carefully. Don’t repeat what others have said. If you are replying to another response use the “reply” button to indicate that, and even better quote the relevant part you are responding to make this clear, but be parsimonious with quoting.
It is good practice to “like” a post if you think it is useful and a positive contribution. The symbol for like is a 
. This lets the author know they have been useful. Also other forum members can see which posts have positive feedback, which can help them to judge which content is good. The forum software also uses likes as part of the progression in trust level for users.
There are other reactions available too
is used to indicate the person who reacted is “looking into” issues raised in the post. This can be helpful to others to know they needn’t spend time on it as someone else is already investigating. It also means they can contact that person to discuss possible solutions.
Marking a solution
Discourse has the ability to mark a reply as the solution to the original query. If you created a topic asking for help or information, and there is a reply that answers your question it is a service to others users to mark that reply as the solution:
When you do this a snippet of the solution and a link to it is included at the end of the original post:
For someone else who has a the same, or similar, question it makes it obvious:
- that there was a solution
- the solution is easy to find