WebBoard users form a community of people who share information and ideas electronically. You can browse through conferences, select topics of interest, look for new messages, post messages for all other users, reply to messages directly through email, and engage in real-time chat sessions. Also, you can learn about other members of the WebBoard community and give them information about yourself.
The list of conferences and the messages in them are displayed in the Conference Menu as a combination of purple and blue text either in plain or italic format.
purple: a visited link
blue: an unvisited link
Note: The colors of links are in general actually controlled by your browser. Mentioned above are the default colors of many browsers. The manager of your board may have set different colors for your boards, overriding your browser colors.
A previously read message or a message that has been marked as read is displayed as plain text. A message that has never been read since your first login is displayed in italics. Note that even if you have marked all messages as read, a message that has not been read may be displayed in italics anyway until you Refresh the display.
After you have read the messages in a conference, you may want to post a new topic or reply to certain messages. To do so, you can select Post from the WebBoard menubar or one of several commands from the little menu above the messages in the Message window. Notice also that the upper portion of each Message window contains summary information indicating the topic and conference name, number of replies, name and email hyperlinks to the sender, and date.
The function of each link in the messages window is described below:
WebBoard has a feature for marking all the messages that you have read. But it does not do so automatically. You need to tell WebBoard which messages are to be marked as read. The two options are:
Marking Messages in One Conference as Read
To mark all the messages in a conference as read,
Click on the 
button
in the menubar at the top.
A window like the one above will be displayed. Click on the name of the conference in which you want to mark all the messages as read. The following message will be displayed:
All messages in "Conference name" have been marked as read.
Marking Messages in All Conferences as Read
If you want to mark all the messages in all the conferences as read,
Click on the button
on the top menu.
In the window displayed as shown above, click on the Mark All Conferences Read link. The message
"All messages in all conferences have been marked as read."
will be displayed.
The Welcome screen displayed when you log in will inform you about any new messages. The list can be viewed by clicking on the link.
The list of new messages looks exactly like the conference menu, except for a different background image. Also, only the new messages are listed, and only the conferences containing new messages:
