How to use the Forum on the epi Website

S. Liebig (epi Secretariat) on behalf of the Editorial Committee

In the right-hand column of the epi website you will find the category "Forum" – this category is only visible after login as this area is restricted for our members.

After having successfully logged into the epi website, every member will have available all forums for which he has access rights. The epi Secretariat has created forum channels for every body of the epi (such as Council, Board and any Committee of the epi), but the individual member will only see the forum channels of the groups to which he belongs.

However, it is possible to create further forum channels upon request – the Secretariat can create a forum channel for any individual group and assign the access rights accordingly –and this is applicable for any existing group within the epi, a composition of several groups and also for individual members of the epi or a group plus an additional member. Therefore, all possibilities to create an individual forum channel are possible.

To start a new tread

Any member of a forum channel who has access rights to this channel can open a new thread within the forum channel to start a new discussion.

To do so the member has to click on "start new thread".

In the following window the member can give a title to the thread, draft a description and add any relevant documents as attachments:

The staff of the epi Secretariat have the moderation rights for every forum channel on the epi website and can edit and revise any contribution upon request.

Any member of the forum channel has the possibility to subscribe to a forum channel as well as to an individual forum thread in order to receive a notification as soon as a new contribution has been added or if there has been any change. This subscription can be activated and deactivated at any time.

Private Message

Furthermore any member of a forum channel can send a "Private Message" to all participants of the forum channel and/or thread.

This offers the possibility to contact any member of the forum channel without knowing his email address and vice versa without providing any personal details any member of the group can be reached. All epi members have a "Private Message" account on our website which is implemented in the right-hand column of the epi website. As soon as a new message has been sent, the member receives a notification by email and the message that a new message has arrived appears in the account of the member accordingly.

All Private Messages are stored in the section "My Account" and can be replied to, deleted or saved by the member upon request.

In addition to this possibility the Secretariat can give moderation rights to one or several members of the forum channel. These moderation rights will allow to this person to revise and delete contributions and to close a thread upon request. This moderation function would be a possibility for all Committee Chairs to moderate their own channels and threads within their committees.

Shared Desk

The "shared desk function" within the forum is a possibility to add a document to the thread of a forum which can be edited by any person who has access rights to this forum channel.

The intention is that several members of a group can work on the same document and that not any revised version of a document should be updated. As soon as a document is uploaded in the forum thread, every member of the forum channel can "check out" the document. Therefore the document will be uploaded on his personal computer for revision. After the revision has been completed the member has to "check in" the document in the forum thread again. The status of the document and which person is temporarily working it is transparent for every member of the group. Every version of the document, every change and date of change and every editor name is saved in the history data and therefore always available and traceable. Only one person can work on the document at a time– as soon as he has "checked out" the document for revision, the document is only visible to the other persons of the group –in order to guarantee that all members are working on the same document.