MCBA's discussion forum runs on a program called Vanilla. This program has some specialized terms and techniques. The ones we've figured out are listed below.
Happy editing.

What does it mean to "whisper your comment to" someone?
"Whisper" makes the comment private - only the person whose name you put in the box will be able to read it (plus the administrators, of course). The comment is hidden from everyone else. This can be a good way to ask a sidebar question without distracting the rest of the participants in a lengthy discussion.

What does "subscribe to the forum" mean? I'm already a member.
On this program, "subscribe" means to sign up for an email notification whenever someone adds a comment to the discussion. The email will go to the address in your profile according to the subscription settings you set. "Subscribe to the discussion" means 'send me an email if someone comments in this particular thread'. "Subscribe to the category" will also get you an email when someone starts a new thread in that category. "Subscribe to the forum" will get you an email for any question in any category.

What does "Make this discussion sticky" mean?
Discussions are sorted based on the recency of the last comment in the thread. Discussions that haven't had much traffic lately will sink to the bottom of the list. Making a discussion "sticky" causes it to stay at or near the top even if no one is commenting on it right now. This FAQ is marked to be "sticky" so new readers can find it more easily.

What does "Sink this discussion" mean?
"Sinking" a discussion is sort of the reverse of making it sticky. A discussion marked to "sink" will continue to age off even if someone comes back and makes a new comment.

What is "Report Post"?
If you see a question or a comment that you think is inappropriate or violates the website's rules, click "Report Post" to send an alert to the administrators. We'll get the bad posts taken down as fast as we can.

Why can't I save my post?
In order to make our site less attractive to spammers, each post is arbitrarily limited to a maximum number of characters (currently set at 5000).  If you have more to say than will fit in 5000 characters, consider breaking your post into two separate topics.

Commenting for the first time

The discussion forum works best if you create an account and sign in to the website.

Unfortunately, the first-time sign-in procedure is not very obvious. An easier way to get to the correct page to create a new account is to simply click here.

Once you've requested that we create an account, it could take up to a few hours to verify your information (less if I'm online at the time). Check back the next day and you should be able to sign in and leave a comment.

The information you provide when creating the account (name and email) is used to verify the account request and to facilitate password resets in the future. It is not used for any other purpose.  In particular, updating your email address here does not update the email address used to receive the MCBA newsletter or vice versa.

I recommend that you start by creating a new discussion about your beeyard. Click the red "Start a new discussion" link in the top left of the screen. On the new page, select the category "Beeyard reports" and title your discussion something like "LastName beeyard". Tell us whatever you'd like about your bees and management practices.

Look forward to hearing from you.