WebCT Bulletin Board - Sending Messages

Overview of Sending Messages

There are two ways to post a message:

by Starting a New Thread
by Replying to a Message. Replies can be made in two ways:
- regular reply
- quoted reply, which will include the text of the message being replied to

To begin a discussion on a new subject, click Compose in the left frame. A message window opens, which allows you to compose a message.

Figure 1 Compose a new message window

Press Post to submit the article to the bulletin board once it has been written. Press Cancel to cancel the operation and return to the bulletin board without submitting a message. Press Preview to see the message as it will appear in the Bulletin Board (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Preview window

Pressing Post or Cancel in the preview window has the same effect as before. Clicking on Edit returns you to the Compose a new message window.

WebCT does automatic line wrapping of messages. Click Don't Wrap in the Compose a new message window to disable this feature. When you have turned this option off, the Don't Wrap button changes to Wrap to allow you to revert back to automatic line wrapping.

The Attach button gives you the option of attaching files to your message (see Attachments for more information).

The next text-entry box is used for the forum name. Below this there is a text-entry box for the subject. The large text-entry box is used for the body of the message. Beneath that is the text box size line. Here you can select the size of the text box from the drop-down list. Press Set Size to apply the new size after you select it. The User ID of the author is displayed in the bottom right hand corner of the Compose a new message window.

Notes:

Both the subject and the body of a message must be filled in before the Bulletin Board will accept a submission. Blank subject fields or message fields are not allowed.
In line-wrapping mode, single carriage returns will be ignored. You must leave a blank line for paragraph breaks. For example, typing the following in the message body ([CR] denotes a carriage return:
```
Hello [CR]







everyone! [CR]







[CR]







How are you all?
```
will result in the following message:
```
Hello everyone!















How are you all?
```
If you have come to the Bulletin Board via a page of notes, composing a new message starts a new thread based on the page of notes you have come from. Thus, in the compose window, the forum and subject are specified automatically.
If New Message is pressed when displaying messages in all forums the new message window allows the user to select the forum to post to by replacing the forum name with a drop-down list of available forums.

Figure 3 The new message window (note the drop-down list in the forum section)

Once you have composed the message, press Post to submit the message to the Bulletin Board. The message window closes and the Bulletin Board listing is once again displayed. To see the new message, press Update Listing in the frames view or Refresh in the no-frames view.

Replying to a Message | Top

A reply usually responds to a posted question or answer. Clicking Reply opens a blank text box for the message, with its subject being the original message subject.

Figure 4 Reply to Message window

If you would like to reply to the message and include text from the original message, click Quote. This opens a text box containing a copy of the message to which you want to reply.

Figure 5 Reply to and Quote Message window

The Quote feature is helpful in addressing particular points in response to a message, because responses may be inserted between lines of the quoted message. As with Compose a new message, press Post to complete the reply or Cancel to cancel the message. Both Quote and Reply will post the message to the same thread as the message to which you are replying.