Create a discussion forum

Encourage project members to work together by creating discussion forums to which project members with the appropriate permissions can post messages.

Discussion forums can also function as mailing lists.

As a forum administrator, you can choose to make a discussion forum either public or private.

  1. Click DISCUSSIONS from the Project Home menu.
  2. On the Forum Summary page, click Create.
  3. On the Create Discussion Forum page, enter a title and description for the forum.
  4. To make it a private discussion forum, set the TYPE to Private. Private discussion forums restrict anyone without specific access permissions from posting to the forum. For example, you may want to restrict a preliminary planning discussion to your project's core team before sharing it more widely.
  5. If you want the forum to work as a mailing list, select Enable Mailing List.
    1. Provide a name for the mailing list in the EMAIL ADDRESSddress field.
      Note: The mailing list name must be unique within a project.
    2. Set who can post to the forum via emails. Choose either User with Roles and Permissions (default) or Allow only forum admins from the Email Posting drop-down list.
    3. Set who can subscribe to monitoring via emails. Choose either User with Roles and Permissions (default) or Allow only forum admins from the Email Monitoring drop-down list.
      Note: Selecting Allow only forum admins for Email Monitoring will not restrict users with 'Discussion-View' permission from getting monitoring emails in case they choose to monitor the forum via the web UI.
    4. Choose how replies to posts are handled by setting the REPLY BEHAVIOR.
      Tip:
      • Many users are accustomed to having their replies go automatically to the whole list. Others are used to having replies go just to the original sender. You should check with your users to see what makes more sense for a particular mailing list.
      • When REPLY BEHAVIOR is set to "To the list," email replies are sent to the list as a whole, not to the individual post. This may be a change from what some users are used to.
    5. Specify a prefix for the subject lines of messages from this list. This can help users sort their incoming messages, if they are subscribed to multiple lists.
    6. You may limit the size of emails (including attachments, if any). Enter the size (in MB) in the MESSAGESIZE field.
    7. Under FOOTER TEXT, provide any information you want to show up at the bottom of each email that subscribers receive. For example, you may want to offer useful web locations or email addresses.
  6. To make this a moderated forum, select ENABLE MODERATION.
    1. Click the Search icon to add moderators. A moderated discussion must have at least one moderator.
      Note: If your project includes members of a parent project, you can select those members too.
    2. Click the Search icon to add trusted users. Posts by trusted users do not need moderator approval.
  7. On the Create Discussion Forum page, click Save.

If you set your forum to work as a mailing list, all project members monitoring the forum will receive notifications whenever a new topic or message is posted.