Colorado Horse Development Authority

President's Forum: Your Account

Under the "Account" tab, you should have a number of options available in your control panel. This documentation will only cover items that appear in the control panel by default. Any options added by extensions should be documented in that extension's documentation.

Personal Information

The personal information form is just that: a place where you can define personal information about yourself. Along with some standard information like your name and email address, we also allow you to specify the location of an icon and a profile picture. These images are meant to be hosted by you on your own server. If you do not have images for these fields, just leave them blank.

Finally, at the bottom of the form, we have a set of inputs where you can enter just about anything about yourself. The idea is to create a bunch of label / values like Birthday and September 16, or height and 6' 4?. This way you can define just about anything about yourself that people might like to know.

Change Password

It is highly recommended that users change their passwords regularly. Some important rules to follow when creating a new password:

• Do not use birth-dates, bank-card pin numbers, telephone numbers, or anything that can be easily guessed.
• Absolutely, under no circumstances should a member use the same password on the CHDA President's Forum as on other web-sites. the CHDA President's Forum is a very secure application, but can be compromised by a malicious user if that user discovers a member's password on another website the member belongs to and applies it on the CHDA President's Forum (we've seen this happen).

Forum Preferences

The forum preferences form allows you to define how the CHDA President's Forum appears and functions for you. Any changes made on this form take place immediately, and you do NOT need to press a save button. When you make a change on this form, a status message should appear on your screen to notify you when the changes have been completed. On the default "the CHDA President's Forum" style, this status message will appear in the top-right corner of the site.

Password Retrieval

If you forget your password, you can reset it by clicking on the "Forgot your password?" link on the sign-in page. You will be prompted to enter your username. Password reset instructions will then be emailed to the email address associated with that username. Using this form DOES NOT change your password. If you are the owner of that email address, you will receive an automated message from the application that will contain a link back to the server where you can change your password.

Please note that some email programs try to auto-link hyperlinks that they find in email messages. Sometimes these programs mess up the links, and this can cause our password retrieval system to break. So, please be sure to copy and paste the entire link from your password retrieval email message into your web browser.

Whispering

A whisper is a private message that appears inline with a discussion. Only you and the recipient of the whisper can see the whisper. It won't affect the paging or comment counting of discussions. It's a way for you to say something secretly to another member in the middle of a discussion. You can also create entirely private discussions by entering a whisper recipient when starting a discussion. Then only you and the recipient can see the entire discussion.

Whispers can only be seen by two people: the one whispering and the one being whispered to. You cannot whisper to multiple people at one time.

Advanced Searching

If you click on the search tab, you might notice the little "Advanced" button to the left of the search inputs. If you click this button, you'll see an expanded version of the three different types of searches. If you tinker around with these inputs and run a few different searches, you'll see some interesting things show up in the search input when you're viewing results. For example: under the "Discussion topic search" heading, enter your username into the "where the author was" input and click search. When the results come up, the search input will contain:

your_username:

Where your_username is actually your username, of course. The results will contain all discussions that you started ordered by the most recently active discussions first.

If you take it a step further and select a category from the category dropdown AND enter your username in the "where the author was" input, you'll see something like this in the search input when you run the search:

cats:Random;your_username:

This time the search results will contain all discussions that you started in the "Random" category.

Take it even further and enter "test" in the "find discussion topics containing" input and you'll see something like this:

cats:Random;your_username:test

This time the search results will contain all discussions that you started in the "Random" category where the word "test" appears in the discussion topic.

When it came to doing searches, we wanted to add a little bit of extra functionality into them; kind of like google does. This type of functionality allows you to easily run fancy searches once you've learned all of the little tricks. Another example: Say your friend "Charlie" was talking about "boats" yesterday, and the forum has gotten really busy since then. Rather than looking through page after page trying to find the discussion, you can just go to the search tab and enter the following into the search input and run it:

Charlie:boats

That's not the only way that searches work for you. We've also made the searches a little more intelligent than your average forum search. We've made it so that you can enter complete phrases into the search input and enclose them in quotes to find exactly what you're looking for. We've also made it smart enough to recognize operators like "and" and "or". So let's say Charlie didn't write "boats" in his discussion topic, but you think he might have said "I love sailing" and also said "boats" somewhere in a comment. This time you can go to the search tab, select the "Comments" radio button and enter this into the search input:

Charlie:"I love sailing" and boats

The search will find any comments where charlie wrote the word "boats" and wrote "I love sailing".