Responding to forum topics

Join in a discussion by responding to forum topics that interest you.

Before you begin

Anyone can respond to a topic in a stand-alone forum. However, to respond to a topic in a community forum, you must be a member of the community.

About this task

If forum topics are moderated, your reply is not displayed immediately because the forum moderator must approve its content first. If content moderation is not enabled, then your reply is displayed immediately.

If the administrator enabled the Reply-To feature, you can respond to topics and topic replies by email. To reply by email, you must be following a topic. For example, when you follow a topic, you receive an email notification when a new comment is added. You can reply directly to that email notification and your email response is posted as a reply on the forum. If the Reply-To feature is not available, ask the administrator to enable it. For more information, see the Configuring Forums for email notification replies topic.

When you respond to a topic, consider the following points:

You can add attachments to a response. Attachments must comply with existing file upload constraints, such as file size and file extension. Embedded images in your reply are processed as attachments.
You can paste an image into a topic reply. For more information, see the Pasting an image topic.
When you reply to an email notification, all previous content is included as part of the reply. To truncate the previous content, manually add #end where you want to end the reply history to end. Content that appears after the #end entry is ignored.
You can reply more than once to an email notification.
To reply to emails, ensure that your settings are configured correctly:
1. Click Settings, and then click the Email Preferences tab.
2. Ensure that Receive notifications from other people by email and Allow me to reply to notifications by email are selected.
3. In the Content that I am following section, ensure that Forums is set to Individual Emails.

Procedure

To respond to a forum topic, complete the following steps:

Open the topic to which you want to respond. The original topic is displayed, along with a list of responses.
Click Reply in the area of the thread to which you want to respond.
Optional: To change the title of your response, click Edit Title and enter a title in the field provided.
Enter your response in the rich text field.
To attach a file to your response, click Attach a File and browse for a file.
Click Save to save your reply.