Welcome!
Step 1: Hang out, read the new threads in topics that interest you and if you have something meaningful to contribute, feel free to jump in.
Step 2: Fast forward a few years, reminisce on this post that you made back when you were new and how you’re a regular community member now like you’ve always been here.
That’s really all there is to it. Don’t feel pressured to have to post or reply to topics. If you have questions always feel free to ask, that’s what we’re here for. If you hang around long enough, that’s what you’ll be here for too. Always feels good to help someone out.
If you’re asking a tech question, the more info you can give about your problem, what you are using for equipment, operating systems, networking (whatever is relevant), the better the answer you will get. Imagine someone asking you “I’m having a problem with my computer, what should I do?” What’s the first few questions you would ask them? What kind of computer is it? What OS? Is it up to date? What have you tried so far? The same applies here. Try and think of it that way, and give that info up front and it cuts out the first few rounds of basic Q&A exchanges, which means you get to the solution part faster.
Some helpful things for site navigation that I use.
On the left side menu, there’s an ability to add a custom section. I have mine called Custom links.
If you click that pencil to edit it, it looks like this (for me anyway):
My 3 links are
Posts By creation date: /latest?order=created
Unread by creation date: /unread?order=created
Posts with no reply: /search?q=max_posts%3A1%20min_posts%3A1%20order%3Alatest_topic
I find those helpful as the default sort order I believe is by last reply. I like to see them in order of when the topic was created.
My bookmark for this site is: Spiceworks Community - Connecting technology professionals since 2008
Now the down side of that is you don’t see the Daily Challenge pop up in your topic list so you need to remember to either click it on the left menu or click My Feed on the left which will show it as well. Every day there’s a new IT trivia question posted. Multiple choice. The points don’t matter, just have fun with it, learn something new, or in some cases something old.
When you view a thread, you will start tracking it. That means notifications. Yay e-mails. Sometimes good, sometimes annoying. You can control that per thread. At the bottom:
Tracking good, watching annoying, unless it’s something you want to be notified about right away. For example you posted a question, or you are actively involved in answering one.
You’re going to want to click your profile pic on the top right and then the profile person at the bottom of the pop out menu to get to your profile.
Head on over to Preferences on the top, tracking on the bottom row.
This is what mine looks like. There are several categories and tags that I follow and I like them to show in my feed, so I have them set to tracked. I don’t want e-mails every time a new reply is made to a topic in them however, which is what you will get if you set them to watched. There are several however where I do like to be notified when there is a new topic created in those areas. Muted is for when you don’t want to see them at all.
Absolutely put the daily challenge in Watching First Post. That just ups the fun factor by making sure you don’t miss out.
Last but not least (and I just realized I manually retyped/screenshot stuff I had in there already):
Also, wish Sean-Spiceworks a happy birthday!
