UIC Board Manager's Guide: WebBoard Version 3.5

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4. Managing Conferences

This section applies fully to conference moderators, as far as the conferences they moderate are concerned. It is the only section pertaining to them. Note that you can give any board user moderator access to any conference. You do this by editing the conference profile as discussed below.

As course instructor, you are responsible for keeping the conferences running. This responsibility involves adding new conferences (discussed before), changing conference settings, deleting old conferences, archiving old messages, and keeping the conference focussed and on track. All these tasks can be accomplished with the Manage Conferences option in the Manager Menu.

This brings up a list of all conferences, with title, creator and current number of messages in the conference, as shown below:

You will notice that there are four options to the left of each conference. These options in detail:

Click on this choice to edit the conference profile. The same menu as displayed in the case of adding conferences will be displayed. Make changes and click Save.

If your board uses WebBoard's internal JavaScript chat program, you will see here an additional option called Chat Spots. During a chat session, you could choose to have a series of images or webpages appear in each user's browser—either randomly or in a specified sequence. This could be useful for a class discussion. Should you wish to use this feature, contact the WebBoard administrator at webboard@uic.edu to inquire about details. You will have to supply the images/pages. After they have been installed, you will be notified what path to enter in the dialogue below:

To delete a conference that may be old or to delete conferences for a course that has been completed, choose the Delete option.

WARNING: Deleted conferences are gone for good and will not be archived!

This action will display a confirmation window:

This option is used to select users for a conference. Note that to select users for a conference, the conference needs to be made a private conference first, which is done by editing its profile. In a private conference, the only people that can read and post messages are the board managers, any moderators you may have chosen, and the users you (or a moderator) added in the following dialogue:

To give users access, select them on the left and click the ADD>> button. To deny someone access, select the name on the right and click <<REMOVE.

Message archiving allows you to keep your conference to a manageable size by keeping the number of messages displayed to a reasonable size. Archiving options are set in the conference profile. As board-manager or conference-moderator, you are allowed to retrieve archived messages at a later time, if the conference has not been deleted entirely.

If your messages had files attached, these will be lost when archiving and restoring the message. They will still be on the server, but you will have no link to them in the restored message.

To view available archived messages, choose this option for the conference you are interested in. The resulting list displays for each message the topic, author, date, and first line of the body.

Click on the Retrieve option by the side of the message. This will retrieve and add the archived message to the conference it had originally been posted to.

Changing the order in which your conferences are displayed is examined in the section on changing board settings.

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