Mastering Gather: The SiteWizard™ for Tuesday, 02/05

You can easily locate all Gather mail messages received from a specific member, or quickly access older messages by using the sort options available in Gather mail.

How is this done?

Each of the column headings (Subject, From, To, Date) in your Gather Mail 'Inbox' and 'Sent' box can be used to sort messages. Clicking once on any heading will initiate a sort of all messages by that element. For example, by default, you will initially see a small arrow displayed to the right of the 'Date' column heading. This arrow will point downward, indicating that the Gather Mail messages are sorted by date, in descending date order (newest on top). Clicking the 'Date' column heading, or the arrow, will change the sort sequence to ascending, which will bring the oldest messages to the top.

This technique can be used to sort mail messages by sender, recipient, and subject as well. Thereby grouping similar messages together, or messages received by, or sent to, a particular member. These columns are sorted alphabetically.

Sorting Gather Mail messages in this manner can be very helpful. However, Gather displays only 25 messages per page. Therefore, depending upon the quantity of mail messages in your 'Inbox' or 'Sent' box, you may still be required to scroll through multiple pages to access grouped messages of interest.

However, you can easily increase the number of messages displayed per page by following the technique outlined in this SiteWizard article.

Tomorrow's Tip ...streamlining your Gather experience!

"Some members have added 'clickable' links to their comments or mail messages. I would like to create links to direct members to my new group or article...so how is this done?"

Creating a link is very easy to do, and can be a great way to connect members to other content on Gather. Outlined below is the method to use when creating links to other articles, images, videos or Gather groups. This will also allow you to create links to other websites outside of Gather.

Please note that this only applies to the creation of links within comments and mail messages on Gather. Creating links from articles requires a different technique, outlined in this SiteWizard article.

There are three primary parts to a link command:

1) The URL (website address) you are linking TO.
2) The text, or image that you want to link FROM.
3) The HTML coding to make it all work.

Until you get comfortable typing the commands from memory, you might want to save the basic HTML 'code' somewhere, and then paste it into your comment/message. Then, modify as required.

This is the basic HTML command for making a link:

To create your link, you would:

1. Paste, or type the HTML command as shown above.
   
   
2. Add the URL you are linking TO after the equal (=) sign (in red, below). This can be an article, image, video, group, namespace, or website.
   
   
3. Add the text you want to make INTO the link between the >< marks.
   (in blue, below)

So, a link to the Gather homepage, like this:

Gather homepage

Would be typed like this:

You may find it useful to practice linking within a Gather mail message you send to yourself, as the technique for inserting links in messages is identical to that used in comments. You may also publish a test article to 'Just Me' and practice in the comment area, as the comments and article are only visible to you.

The reporting of content for site policy violations is a contentious subject, and often generates very polarized views on how the content reporting process should work. What improvements or suggestions do you have for how content reporting should be handled on Gather?