HELP

What’s SPREAD?

SPREAD is mainly an online platform for drilling and sub-sea professionals, to share their ideas and knowledge, and to get help related to their profession, and to know the best practices and tools in the industry which help to make a better outcome, reduce risks etc…

How SPREAD is organised?

Members of SPREAD are grouped by their organisation. Thus to register with SPREAD, everyone needs to choose their organisation from the registration page. If your organisation is not listed there, you may make request to add your organisation name at the time of registration.

All the discussions under the forum are organised under various categories known as discussion groups. Some of the groups are further divided into subgroups for a better classification.

How do I proceed through the discussion forum?

When you click on a group’s or sub-group’s name under the discussion forum, you are taken to the list of discussions it contains. A discussion is a written conversation between members on some specific topic of interest. A registered member starts out a discussion as a single post and grows as more and more members share their ideas on what was so sought by the member who initiated the discussion.

To start a new thread simply click on the Start new Discussion button at the top right corner of any group’s page (you will need to login to continue with this operation).

The discussions under a group are chronological (latest on top). You may see the discussion title, owner of discussion, name of last contributor to a discussion, last contributed date, number of responses received etc.

More over, users can see a list of “Most recent discussions” across all groups from the home page.

There’s a View all discussions button under this list to see the list of all discussions from every group. A link named “view all discussions“, to same page is also provided under the “discussion forum” tab in the main header of the site.

By default, all the discussions in the above list are in the chronological order(newer at the top). However, there a facility to sort the discussions in the orders of discussion titles, usernames of initial posts, names of discussion groups and even in the number of responses received. To sort the discussions, simply click on the column headers. Clicking again on the same header will reverse the order of sorting.

A pagination bar is provided at the top and bottom of the list for the ease of navigation through the list.

Most recent discussions

On the left hand side of SPREAD home page, there’s a list titled “Most recent discussions”. This list contains a set of all ongoing discussions. Whenever a new discussion or a new response (to a discussion) arrives, it’ll be displayed at the top of this list. Clicking on the arrow Last post on the left side of each title will take you to the last reply under any discussion, or to the discussion itself, if there’s no response received.

How do I know whether I’ve opened (read) a discussion page or not?

SPREAD will show the titles of all discussions in dark bold which are not yet opened (read) by the user. This feature applies to the titles displayed through out SPREAD, such as in the “Recent discussions” shown on the home page, in the list of discussions under a group, in the list of discussions returned for a search in forum etc. On the other hand, the links will be greyed out if the user has already visited that page. To add consistency to some more degree, when a new response arrives for a discussion already read by a user, it’ll be shown in bold (as if “unread”) to preclude the chance of missing the new arrivals.

However this feature is browser and system specific and thus your read history will not get transferred to another browser/system that you may sometimes prefer to use.

How do I know more about organisations and members of SPREAD?

There’s a link under the “my SPREAD” tab, named “member organisations” to see the list of organisations added into SPREAD. Clicking on the organisation names will show you the list of members under them and their joining date (you will need to login to continue with this operation). Clicking the Usernames of members will show you their public profiles.

You may also navigate to the profile a organisation and members from the member details given along side of any discussion or response.

Breadcrumb

Breadcrumbs is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It gives users a way to keep track of their location within programs or web-pages.

In SPREAD, we have provided breadcrumbs horizontally, across the top of almost all pages, below the main header. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page, in hierarchical site structure. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. A double right angle quote(») is used to seperate the links/sub titles

For example, when you are browsing through the sub-group “Best Practices Forum”, under “DWOP COMMENTS”, you’ll see a breadcrumb at the top of the page like,

Discussion Forum » DWOP COMMENTS » Best Practices Forum

You may click on the links to go back to the previous pages in the heirarchy.