A guide for new users

franush

Greetings, is there a guide for new users for how to make sense of the notification settings and what a “wall” is etc. It took me a while to be able to reliably find where the settings were even located. I was thinking about making such a guide available to newly signed on members - and any advice on how to make such a guide available would also be appreciated, thanks.

Kaspar

Take look here

https://docs.vanillaforums.com/

pitkmi

A beginners guide is a probably pretty good idea. A lot of the frustrations and confusion occasionally posted here seem to stem from lacking or conflicting documentation. I mean you can always search the forum, but that's not a particularly pleasant user interface for looking for information about things you're unfamiliar with. Sometimes it's nice to have someone tell you how something works. At least in the beginning. 🤔

franush

Thanks @Kaspar and @pitkmi.

I had a look at that link and it seems mainly aimed at forum managers, there was a little like what I was looking for at https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/81-vanilla-knowledge-user-guide but I think it was just an example of how to write such a guide.

I realise that I may have been a bit ambiguous by saying new users, I meant new forum users rather than new forum managers. Forum managers really have a lot more to learn. There is a lot of information in vanillaforums.com but I couldn't find what I was looking for. Is there a guide for plain forum members (not managers or admins) to orient them on how to use the wide range of features available to them for posting discussions, commenting on discussions, setting notification options and understanding the different categories, editing their posts, being able to send private messages etc. I guess it's possible to learn all these things by trial and error and exploring all the settings which, as modern user interface trends would have it, are quite abbreviated. Does it exist yet or is it that everything is so intuitive that it's deemed as not necessary. My aim is to have such a document available to my new forum members. 🤔

Kaspar

Maybe

https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/262407/#Comment_262407

franush

Thanks @Kaspar that link helped a lot, there's a playlist of 8 videos called "User On-Boarding" at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdMTbLR4h8xC7XwUrfZ4s5IoQ9Of6Ihn and the individual video titles are:

1. Welcome To Vanilla Forums: Member Edition

2. Creating An Account

3. Setting Up Your Forum Profile

4. Reacting to Content

5. Personal Conversations

6. Advanced Editor

7. Creating a Discussion in Vanilla Forums

8. Using @Mention in Comments

That's a total of 12.5 minutes of viewing which isn't too much of a burden.

This will probably be the intro bundle for my new users, it would be great if there was a written guide but this will do. Hi @pitkmi just letting you know I've found something.