Pistachio Backtalk Help:
Entrance Page
Read this first: Introduction to Pistachio Backtalk
The Entrance Page:
The Entrance Page is the front door to the conferencing
system. Since there is a lot of traffic through this page, we have kept it
short and simple. It displays any daily messages put up by the system
administrators, and it gives a few commands to start reading conferences and
configure your account.
If you want to set a bookmark so you can return easily any time you like,
use the ``Bookmark'' facility of your browser to set a bookmark on this page.
On other pages, you will see lots of 
buttons. Clicking
one of these will return you to this Entrance Page.
Getting to the Conferences:
Since the main thing people come to a conferencing system for is conferences,
there are three different ways to get into the conferences from here.
All of these will get you to the conferences home
page for the conferences you choose:
- The
button is big and brassy because that's the most
common way to scan the conferences. Each user can maintain a hot list of
the conferences they are most interested in. This buttons will start
you reading all the new items and responses in all your hot conferences, skipping over those conferences that have nothing new in
them.
- ``List all conferences'' displays a list of all the conferences on the
system. You can then click on the name of which ever conference you want
to read. This is especially useful for new-comers to the system who
aren't familiar with the conferences available.
- ``Goto conference'' allows you to type the name of a particular conference
that you'd like to visit. You can often abbreviate the names, and it
doesn't matter if you type them in upper case or lower case.
You can also edit your hot list of conferences using the ``Edit your conference hot list'' button.
This is your chance to customize the list of conferences that the
``Read New'' button walks you through.
(Note: You can't edit the hot list if you are an anonymous user, so this
button won't appear.)
If you want to see a quick summary of how many active
items there are in each of your hot list conferences,
select the ``Summarize hot list conference activity'' button.
This will bring up a list of you hot list conferences, each with
its number of brand new items, and its number of items with new responses.
There is an option on the option setting page that
causes this summary to always be shown on the entrance page.
Pistachio can display a list of the most recently posted items and responses. By default, the 5 newest messages are
displayed. The number displayed can be changed from the
option setting page.
Alternatively, you can use the ``List last postings''
button to goto a page that displays many more recent messages.
User Information Commands:
Normally all users of the Backtalk conferencing system will have accounts
that they use to access it. Each user can set various options and make
various personal information available to other users.
The entrance page has two commands for accessing user information:
- ``Edit your Personal Settings.''
This button will bring you to a page where you can customize various
aspects of your account,
including the information that is displayed to other users and
a few settings that effect the behavior of the Pistachio interface.
- ``Search for a User.''
This button will bring you to a page where you can list other users and
see what they have to say about themselves.
- Backtalk version 1.4.6 - Copyright 1996-2005, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss