What's the Forum Like?
A guide to the TIAA Forum: About Categories, Topics, and more.
If you are not familiar with forums, it can feel a bit like you have entered a new world. It isn’t that hard; you will figure it out pretty quickly. But perhaps a little introduction will help.
How it works.
The forum consists of various discussions or conversations, each beginning with a conversation starter, followed by responses. In our terminology, such a discussion is called a topic. A topic can be posted by any member of the Forum and other members can post responses, or replies, that keep the conversation going. The conversation continues, often back and forth. If a topic remains idle for 30 days, the topic is closed, but is still available for search.
To organize topics into similar subject areas, topics are arranged into categories. The creator of a topic specifies which category to assign the topic to. Examples of categories include “How To”, “Help Wanted”, and the more general “Technology”. For a complete list of categories on our active forum,. see here.
You can choose which topics to follow and only see topics in the categories that interest you. Similarly, when a new topic is started, you can choose not to follow that topic. Thus you can eliminate all the “noise” and just see the categories and conversations that interest you.
One member can also Private Message, or PM, another member, like an email within the forum.
The TIAA Forum is a moderated forum. That means a team of moderators follow the forum to keep it orderly and clean. We have a set of guidelines for use in the forum which you can see here. Things like being polite, staying on topic, etc. So for example, a moderator might move a topic from its category to a more appropriate category, or PM the creator of a post reminding them of our guidelines and asking them to edit their post. This Forum is fortunate that our members are generally polite and thoughtful in their postings.