Adding a bulletin board

In this section, you will continue to define the document Tutorial that you created in the previous section, by specifying the bulletin boards which you want Callisto to read while the document is open.  For convenience, the tutorial uses the bulletin board at MarsJupiter.com.

Contents

1. adding the board
2. entering and checking the Forum List URL
3. scanning for forums
4. the next step

NB -  if your document Tutorial is not already open from the previous section, you need to open it by selecting File and Open and choosing Tutorial  from the list of available documents.  Be careful to select the document with the green Callisto icon and not the folder Tutorial.

1: adding the board

Click the Add Bulletin Board button at the bottom of the Document Window to see the Edit Board dialog:

Highlight the existing name Board 1 and enter MarsJupiter.

This is a descriptive name for use within Callisto only - so it could be any concise, meaningful name.  Note, though that the dialog will not accept spaces in the board name.

2: Entering and checking the Forum List URL

This is the address of the Web page where a list of the forums in the board can be found.  For this tutorial, enter the address:

http://www.marsjupiter.com/phpBB2/index.php

 

Now check the address you have entered by clicking the Open button next to the text box.  Your browser should open onto the MarsJupiter bulletin board.  If it doesn't, make sure you have typed the URL completely and correctly - don't, for example, miss out http://.

The MarsJupiter bulletin board is a typical bulletin board front page, with a list of the forums on the board (in this case divided into several categories) and some header information, together with the inevitable advertising (omitted in the illustration!). When you are trying to add a bulletin board to a Callisto document, you need first to find the equivalent of this page - you can then simply copy the URL from the address line of your browser.

3: scanning for forums

To save you having to specify them manually, Callisto can automatically detect the forums by scanning the page you have specified.  To start the process, click the Scan for Forums button at the bottom of the dialog.  Callisto posts a message window which shows you the progress of the scan:

The illustration shows just the start of the scan - there are a lot of forums at MarsJupiter, but that is not untypical.  You should see Callisto finding the forums one by one, first as suspected, then as confirmed.

When the scan is complete, the Edit Board dialog should look something like this, showing the name of each forum and how it was found:

4: the next step

You may remember from the Getting Started tutorial, that Callisto automatically stores all topics in the New Articles Callisto forum.  However, it is much more useful to specify your own Callisto forums and this is the subject of the next section.

Finally, we will return to the Edit Board dialog to tell Callisto which forums to read and how often and where to store the topics it finds.  For now, though,  click the Close button to close the Edit Board dialog, but leave Callisto running with your Tutorial document open.