HELP
SPREAD is 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 and reduce risks etc.
How SPREAD is organised?
Members of SPREAD are grouped by their organisation. Thus, to register with SPREAD, users need to choose their organisation from the registration page. If your organisation is not listed, you may make a request to add your organisation name at the time of registration.
All the discussions under the forum are organised by categories known as discussion groups. Some of the groups are further divided into subgroups for a better classification.
How do I Register on SPREAD?You can watch the video below which will walk you through our registration process.
How do I use the discussion forum?
When you click on a group or sub-group name in 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 a discussion as a single post and it grows as more and more members share their ideas on what was 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 be logged in).
The discussions under a group are chronological (newest first). You may see the discussion title, owner of discussion, name of last contributor to a discussion, last contributed date, number of responses received etc.
Moreover, 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 the 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 chronological order (newest 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 lefthand side of the SPREAD homepage, 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 throughout SPREAD, such as in the Recent Discussions shown on the homepage, 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 learn 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 to 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 view this). Clicking the usernames of members will show you their public profile.
BreadcrumbBreadcrumbs are navigation aids used in user interfaces. It gives users a way to keep track of their location within programs or webpages.
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 separate the links/sub-group titles.
FFor 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 hierarchy.