The Landlord Law Members Forum

I am delighted to announce that our Landlord Law members discussion forum is now live!

There has unfortunately been a bit of a delay in getting this up and running as we needed to get some development work done to ensure that only Landlord Law members could access it.  However, this is now done and the forum is live!

Using the forum

There were a number of complaints that people tended to have about our forum on the old site:

• Members could not change their display name
• It was difficult sometimes to find their own posts
• Sometimes they were not notified about replies to posts they had done

This new Landlord Law site is run on a different system (WordPress rather than Drupal) and so we have been able to use a newer more modern forum software which deals with all these issues:

• You can change the ‘display name’ your forum posts appear under in your profile area – so if you want to change this from ‘John Smith’ to ‘The Lone Ranger’ this is now possible.
• Your profile has an ‘activity area’ where you can see links to all your own posts
• You can also subscribe and unsubscribe to forum topics

Asking questions

Most areas of the forum are pretty much the same as other forums – you do a topic, and people reply to it.

However, in the ‘Your Questions’ section where you ask for help (the most common use of the forum), we have used a ‘question and answer’ format.  This works as follows:

• You ask a question
• People can comment on the question (eg ask for clarification) – using the comment button
• People can then answer the question – using the ‘Answer’ button
• People can then comment on the answer (for example say that they disagree saying why)
• You can also vote on the question and the answer.

The main problem with this so far as that people are posting what are really, comments, as answers.  No doubt people will get the hang of it in time.

Members reputation

We also have a ‘reputation’ which was part of the software.  So you are ‘New member’, ‘Active member’ ‘Eminent member’ etc depending on how many posts you have done.

With a little badge – the colours of which changes from green to yellow to orange to red.

I haven’t altered the naming of the levels as I thought they were quite amusing.  Members can find out what they are by doing lots of posts …

Points

You can also earn points as follows:

• Completing your profile area – 20 points
• Per post posted – 1 point

You can find out more about the points system here.

Finding the forum

• There is a link to it at the top of the ‘Services’ menu on the site header
• Most articles and FAQ and other content pages include a link to the forum
• You can type https://landlordlaw.co.uk/forum/ in your internet browser address bar

Or you can click here.

If you are not logged in you will see the page but none of the forum areas or posts.

I hope you all enjoy using our new forum area.