Forum per Email lesen
Some people have reservations towards the online forum format and and prefer to follow individual online discussions via their mail clients or similar offline technologies. For all those, there is good news: You can conveniently peruse the ATLAS.ti forum and take active part in its discussions without even starting your Web browser! (Well, for the most part anyway.)
The ATLAS.ti forum makes it easy to have all discussion threads that interest you sent right to your email inbox and/or similar offline reading devices. Thread subscriptions plus email notifications, and a full RSS news feed make it easy and convenient to be part of the community without dealing with the technical aspects of the online forum.
Subscribing to Threads (aka, Emulating the Mailing List)
On every thread you view in any of the forums, you have the option (via the "Thread Tools" button) to subscribe to it and be notified of any new postings by email.
"Subscribed Threads" lets you see the threads you are currently subscribed to and lets you manage your subscriptions.
You can even create folders and use them to manage your subscriptions. This is equal to creating a personalized edition of the entire forum, focussing on just those topics that interets you. Your folders will contain only those contributions from your subscribed threads and fora.
In addition, you can select how you would like to be notified of new postings and other changes in your subscribed threads:
- No email notification
- Instant notification by email
- Daily updates by email
- Weekly updates by email
RSS
RSS is a simple technology to transmit "news" headlines to a variety of dedicated devices and clients. It lets you see what's going on a Web site--or forum--without logging into it and even without opening your Web browser.
RSS capability is already integrated in some popular mail clients (e.g., Thunderbird), so RSS news are available very convieniently right alongside your email.
Then there is a large number of commercial and free RSS clients (also referred to as "aggregators") which offer differing degrees of convenience in managing incoming news. We found RSS bandit useful, but there are many others. Google should quickly take you to some of the best and most popular.
And there are online services (e.g. www.bloglines.com) that let you read RSS news online, much like (and often along with) email in a web interface.
All these aggregators require is a simple URL (Web address) from which to fetch the news information. The URL of the ATLAS.ti Forum is:
Simply copy and paste this URL into your RSS client, and you'll be informed regularly of new discussion topics.
Some clients (such as RSS Bandit) even allow you to directly reply to individual posts. By clicking on the post heading, the client takes you to that very post in the forum and logs you in (provided that the original login cookie is still available on your machine). You can then write and post your response--and you didn't even have to fire up your Web browser!
In short, RSS is THE technology for all of those users who feel more at home in the world of mailing lists and offline communication.
