Private topic help, please!

[marmalady]

Is there any way to add contacts to an already existing private topic?

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Tough times don't last - tough people do.

[Jeff]

This is the OpenTopic help for private topics...

Private Topics

Create a Private Topic

Click the New tab, then click Topic. You'll see an expansion list that contains the names of all forums available. Choose which forum you wish your post to appear in, and click. You will see a screen to select other members to invite into your topic. Use the "Add" and "Remove" buttons to create your invitation list, and then click "Invite These Members." Next, confirm your participants. Create a subject and message for the Private Topic, and click "Post Private Topic Now." Your invitees will receive an email invitation to participate.

To see your open Private Topics, click the My Space tab and select Private Topics.

Only those people you invite will be able to see or participate in your Private Topic; you can remove any member from the Private Topic at any time. One word of caution: the community Admin CAN see your Private Topic content, as he/she has access to, and control over, the content of the entire community.

Private Topic Notifications

By default, every user is subscribed to notifications of new private topics to which they are invited (as well as all replies). If you wish to change the default setting, click the My Space tab, select "Notifications", and click "edit" to the right of the "Private Topics" forum.

It says members can be removed. I tried both adding and removing members from an existing topic and couldn't figure either one out. Maybe you remove members by deleting them from your contact list entirely. Not sure.

Anyway, it looks like at this time we can't add members to an existing topic. I even tried to see if an administrator could do it at a member's request and there didn't seem to be a way to do that, either.

I think we'll have to start new private topics when we want to invite new members.....pasting the text of the previous topic as the first post of the new topic.

BTW, everyone, the help cautions that administrators can see all private topics. When I click on Private Topics, however, I only see the ones I am invited to. It's a laborious admin task to read others. And we never read private topics unless a need might arise. So far there has never been any need for us to read anyone's private topic.

~See you at the SCIWire-used-to-be-paralyzed Reunion http://www.stopstart.fsnet.co.uk/smilie/wavey.gif ~

[marmalady]

Thanks, Jeff - Guess I'll start cuttin' and pastin'!

Okay - How do you close out a private topic?

_____________
Tough times don't last - tough people do.

[This message was edited by Marmalady on 02-09-03 at 16:43.]

[Jeff]

When you click and bring up a topic the Tools menu has an option called Close. This closes the topic.

~See you at the SCIWire-used-to-be-paralyzed Reunion http://www.stopstart.fsnet.co.uk/smilie/wavey.gif ~

[jplw]

I ran into this problem today, and I also had to cut and paste. It seemed to work. It wasn't pretty but it worked. In my opinion there should be a button to add people. Is it a program thing that can't be changed?

jOE

[Wise Young]

marm and jplw, this is a topic that I have discussed with infopop earlier. Apparently, because of privacy and security considerations, Infopop decided that it would not be appropriate to allow additional contacts to be added to an existing topic. Despite my suggestions to them that this should be changed, they decided not to.

May I suggest the following approach instead of the time-consuming copy and pasting? With internet explorer, you can just save the web page as a file. You can just start a new topic with the old file attached, so that people can see the previous responses. I just tried this with private topics and it works. I just checked and see that the attached file size for Private Topics is 1 Mb, more than enough for such files.