LAVA News

Quick clarification on the "Report to Moderator" link that appears on all posts: please use this to draw the moderators' and administrators' attention to a post for any reason - doing so puts your request into a queue that all moderators are able to actively work through, and are able to track/sign-off/etc, so it's a lot easier for us to work with something in that system than it is if you PM one of us individually.

We don't always read every post to LAVA (shocking, I know ), but the "Report to Moderator" isn't only to report objectionable content: it's the best way to let us know if you need us to move/rename/edit a thread of your own too.


Source: Using the "Report to Moderator" link

When you registered for LAVA, we asked you what version of LabVIEW you use the most: this is to help others frame their replies to your questions, and helps them to recognize that they shouldn't post a LabVIEW 2011 VI in a response to your threads if you've listed your main version as 8.2.

We added LabVIEW 2011 to the list in August, so now's a good time to update your profile to reflect the version of LabVIEW you use the most.  Edit your profile here (and why not make sure all you other details are current, including yout avatar?)


Source: Time to update your Forum LabVIEW Version

LAVA has a new feature which was introduced during the upgrade. You now can add tags to your posts to identify them better and to group posts that cross-cut different forums.

For example. Say you create a post about having difficulty with serial communication and trying to display this data on a graph. You could put this topic in the hardware forum, or the User Interface forum. But not both. Now you can put it in the Hardware forum and just add some tags, like: Serial, Graph, User Interface.

So now if someone wants to lookup all content related to graphs, they can search the Graphs tag and see all content regardless of forum location.

This feature is exposed in the post create\edit form as shown in the image below.

We had the option of having predefined tags which you could pick from a list or user defined tags. It wasdecided to leave it open so the community could create the tags. We're hoping that this won't be abused and that useful tags are created. The tagging system will go through an evaluation period to see how the community likes it. At the end of the evaluation, we will see if it will continue or be turned off.

Please do not create unnecessary tags. Consider how the tag helps categorize and identify the post or topic so it will help others find your content.

Note: Separate tags with commas.

We have added the ability to create a blog on LAVA. Right now, every LAVA member can create a blog. To get started. Click on the "Create New Blog" button on the main blog page here. After you've created one blog, if you want to create another blog then you can do that from the "Manage Blogs" link in your username pulldown in the top right corner.

Some useful things to know:

• You can add additional authors to your blog. This is useful when you have a group project you want to work on and have several LAVA members contribute to one blog.
  
• You can create more than one blog. So you can have, for example, a personal blog and a project blog.
  
• You can add polls to your blog.
  
• You can save drafts and publish at a later date. Typical blog stuff.
  
• You can replace the default RSS Url with a feedburner URL. This prevents "lock-in". This allows you to move your blog to a different platform later but your RSS subscribers will never know.
  
• You can create a blog post from any forum post by clicking "blog this" in the bottom right corner of the post.

One guideline:

• Blogs with no posts or entries will be removed by the administrators at our discretion. In order to avoid this, please create an introductory post when you start your blog.

I'm hoping some of you on LAVA find the blog feature useful.