ADVICE ON
POSTING 
 

ADVICE ON POSTING

One of the most frustrating things about these communities is that posts sometimes get lost. This section gives advice on how to best prevent either losing your posts, or your words entirely.

Firstly, before you even consider making a post on a messageboard, you should make sure that you have signed in and ONLY on the MSN communities home page - a bug in the system means the "sign in" button above each messageboard does not always work properly.

To sign in on the MSN communities homepage, here is the URL:

http://groups.msn.com/people

BOOKMARK IT!

Now, once you've signed in you have eliminated the first real problems you may encounter.

It is important to note that periodically, usually every 12-24 hours, MSN will automatically sign you out.

HOWEVER - and this is very important - if you are typing a long post it is highly recommended that you do so in a word-processing program on your computer, rather than on the MSN online wordpad. That way, in the event of any problems, even should MSN lose your posting first time, you can still have a hard copy on your computer and merely copy it back into the MSN wordpad.

NOT every post starts long - but it is very easy to start with one mere idea and then expand and expand upon it, creating a longer post than intended. If this should occur, you are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to follow the following procedure BEFORE you post your message!

      • Press CTRL+A to highlight your entire text
      • THEN press CTRL+C to copy the highlighted text to your computer's internal clipboard.

    This means that if the post becomes inexplicably lost, you still have a copy inside your PC that you can recover by using any word processing application (including the MSN wordpad) simply by pressing CTRL+V.

     

    Sometimes MSN have periodic glitches where nothing works properly. If so, and you have followed the above procedures, then at least you should have either an original or rescued copy of your text for posting at a later date (ie, when you do not experience posting problems).

    Hope that may be of some use. It is very very very frustrating to lose the especially longer posts - and always keep an eye on your membership status within the blue bar just above MSN's wordpad - if your name isn't there save your text immediately and sign in again, or else lose your post. But as mentioned above, it is always best to copy your work just in case MSN have decided to sign you out while you were composing your thoughts into text - you will show as a member until you attempt to post and receive an error message instead of being able to view your contribution to the thread.

    Anyway, have fun and hopefully, trouble-free posting,