Registration
Registering as a member in Barha is easy: all you have to do is chose a username, and state your email address and agree to the Terms of Use. Plese read the Terms of Use carefully before accepting.
You will get a confirmation mail where you click on the link back to Barha (or login again with your username and the given password) and your membership is confirmed. You can now start editing your profile and your account information.
The only information which has to be visible for other users of Barha is your username. All other information you choose yourself how public you want it to be.
For more details see My account below.
General introduction
Barha Community is based on two basic functions:
- each member has a personal blog
- members can create and/or join groups
As a member you can create one or more groups and ask others to join. A group can e.g. be focusing on a research subject of common interest, or on discussions around a common project.
Group members have to become members of the Barha Community, but you can still invite people who are not members of Barha to join your group, They will simply be asked to register as members of Barha first before joining the group.
Groups can be free for anyone to join, or membership can be moderated or by invitation only. The Group can also be public or closed and so only visible to the members.
When you write a blog entry on your personal blog you can choose if you want the blog entry to be visible only on the pages of one or more of the groups you are a member of, or to all of Barha's members, or if it can be public, i. e. visible also to non-members of Barha. Anyone who visits your personal blog will only see the entries they are allowed to see.
For more information on groups and on how to write blog entries, see below under Add Content.
Navigation menus (top right menu)
Groups
Here you will find a list of all the publicly listed groups on Barha. A group can also choose not to be listed publicly.
For each group you get information on number of members, a short description and membership conditions. Click on the group name to go to the groups main page.
Blogs
Under blogs you get a list of the most recent blog entries which you have permission to see, i. e. ones that are public, for all Barha members and/or published within your groups. You can also see in which group the blog entry has been posted, as well as the author and the tags given to this blog entry. You can leave a comment to the blog entry. Click on Read more to see the whole entry for longer entries.
Events
Here you get the Events calendar and can click on a calendar item for more information.
Add content
Here you can write a blog entry, publish an event to the calendar, create a new group, create a poll or publish a link. You can also create a profile for your account if you have not done so already.
Please note: You must be logged in as a member to add content!
Create a blog entry
Create a blog entry by filling in the form:
Title: the title of the blog entry will show as the headline of the post on your blog page.
Tags: the tags field should contain a comma separated list of categories/keywords describing the post. This is meant to help other users finding blog posts within their areas of interest.
Body: in the Body field you can put the body text of the post. This can be pasted from most word processing applications such as MS Word. After pasting please check the formatting of your text before submitting your post.*
Disable rich text.
Audience: the Audience of the post is a very important aspect of Barha. In most cases you would want to post in one of two ways:
For my group only
You wish to post a blog entry that is visible only to a certain group's members. This will of course restrict commenting on the post to members only, so this should only be used for entries that have no interest for the Barha community in general.
This is done by checking the box next to the group you wish to post within (this requires a membership of the group) and not checking the Public box.
Within my group but visible to all
This is probably the most useful choice in most cases. This will put you blog post within the group, alerting fellow group members of your contribution and making sure further commenting will appear within the confines of the group also. All members of Barha will be able to comment on your post and the visibility of the blog entry will be greatly increased.
This is done by checking the box next to the group you wish to post within and checking the Public box.
It is also possible to post within several groups both publicly and not.
You can always go back and edit a posted entry.
Create an event
Is done the same way as a blog entry. The only difference is that you need to choose a start date and an end date for the event.
Upon submission the event will be posted to the Events calendar on Barha.
Create a group
As a member you can create one or more groups and ask others to join. A group can e.g. be focusing on a research subject of common interest, or on discussions around a common project.
Group members have to become members of the Barha Community, but you can still invite people who are not members of Barha to join your group, They will simply be asked to register as members of Barha first before joining the group.
Groups can be free for anyone to join, or membership can be moderated or by invitation only. The Group can also be public or closed and so only visible to the members.
If you create a group you automatically become the manager of the group. On your group's page, via the link with number of members in the left side menu, you get access to a members administration page Here you can then get a list of the members, see new requests for membership and approve or deny them, or manually add new members. Here you can also handle membership roles for other members of the group and make other members group administrators. You can also renounce your group manager role and assign it to another member.
Group administrator: can approve memberships
Group member: can add content and make comments
Group subscriber: can only read content, but not add content
Create a group by filling in the form:
Group name: Choose a suitable name
Description:Give a brief description for the list of Groups.
Tags: by giving the group tags, you make it easier to find for those interested in the same areas
Group image: upload a logo or a suitable image for your group
Description: this part of the description can be longer. It will be displayed on the group's homepage and below the brief description you wrote before
Disable rich text
Membership requests:here you choose how membership in the group is managed. Please note that if your choose to make your group closed only the Group manager can add or remove people from the group.
List in groups directory / Private group: if you don't want the group to be visible to anyone but the members of the group and not be listed on the Groups page, you should mark it as a private group.
Please note that if a group is private none of the content published to the group will be visible to others. As a member of the group you can still post material to other groups or publicly though, as everything is posted by individual members.
Create a poll
A poll is a question with multiple choices for answers which visitors can choose among.
Fill in the form:
Question: write the question which you want the visitors to answer
Choice 1-5: write the different answers to choose between. More choices can be added.
Poll duration: choose how long the poll will be open
Audience: Choose to whom the poll should be available.
Submit a link
Fill in the form:
URL: copy or write the webaddress
Title: give the link a title
Description: write a description
Tags: give the link tags to make it easier to find for those interested in the subjects
Audience: choose to whom the link should be visible.
Create a profile
If you have not created a profile to your membership on Barha, you can do so here. For more details see below under My Account.
My account
Under My account you can edit and update your personal information, set your choices for notifications and see all your group memberships and blog entries.
Edit
Here you can write a profile information which you can then choose to whom it should be visible. This is an possibility to present yourself only to the members of groups you join and otherwise keep your anonymity on Barha if you so wish.
Here you can also
-
- change your password,
- upload a picture,
- create a signature to use when you make comment
- choose how often you want the notifications from Barha about new content to be sent to you. You can choose not to get any notifications at all. Group administrators can still send you messages for important membership issues.
If there are any changes made in the Terms of Use you will be asked to accept them again here.
Messages
Here you will find a list of your last blog entries.
Notifications
Here you find the last notifications sent to you.
Track
Here you can track all our activities on Barha.