[The Deaf Village Logo]

The Deaf Village Navigation Guide

The Deaf Village doesn't look like most other forums on the Net, and navigating the site can be confusing if you don't understand what's going on. In this Navigation Guide, we explain how to move around The Village, and how the various navigation options can help you.
Almost all of The Village's pages are laid out in a similar way, and the picture below illustrates a typical Village page. In fact, it's the Village Debating Chamber, but it could be anywhere in the Village because this style of page can be found throughout the entire site.
[Picture of The Village Debating Chamber, Area A - The Information Area][Picture of The Village Debating Chamber, Area B - Places and Topics][Picture of The Village Debating Chamber, Area C - Messages]
The page can be divided up in to three three distinct areas, and we've labelled them on the picture to explain how it all works. Area A is an Information Area, and has lots of useful stuff about where you are in the Village and how you got there. Area B contains the places and topics that are within the current thread, and area C contains the posts. Let's look at each of these areas in some detail:

Area A - Information Area

At the top of each page is the Information Area. As it's name suggests, it's there to help you understand the site - but it allows you to perform some useful actions too. Let's look at these actions first.

Actions

The action bar, as it's called, looks like this:
[The Action Bar]

There are four links here that allow you perform various tasks or actions. They are: Let's look at each of these in more detail.

Logout

Clicking this link will log you right out of The Deaf Village altogether, and take you back to the Login page.

Server statistics

Clicking this link will open up a small additional panel that displays some interesting Server statistics. These include such things as who is signed on at the moment, how many posts have been made and so on. In case you're wondering, the "Server" is the technical name for the central computer that holds the Village software.

Mark everything read

As explained a bit later on, the site will try and help you keep track of which posts you have read and which you haven't seen yet. If you decide that you don't care about this, you can tell the system to pretend that you've read everything by clicking on this link. Don't worry if you don't fully understand at this stage, as you'll find more about posts and postings in The Deaf Village Posting Guide.
When you first register at the Village, all messages will be flagged as unread. Because the Village is very large, we don't expect you to actually read everything that is already there. Therefore it is a good idea to 'Mark everything read' to begin with, and then if you see any 'unread' flags later on, you know that a message has been posted since you registered.

Edit user profile

When you registered for The Village, the system automatically creates what is known as a User Profile. All the things that relate to your identity on the site are contained here. All your registration details are securely stored here, for instance, and only you can access them. You can read all about your user profile options in The Deaf Village Community Guide.

Syndication and The Village RSS Feeds

Underneath the list of actions are some icons that look like this [RSS Icons] labelled Syndication. These relate to advanced Village features, namely RSS feeds. You don't need to understand RSS feeds to use the Village because they are rather technical, but if you are interested they are fully explained in The Deaf Village Community Guide.

Display options

The picture here shows the Display options:
[Some typical Display options]

There are four options, and we'll look at each in turn: Of the four options shown, the "Sorted by thread" option is shown in bold text, and cannot be clicked. This is because the page is currently being displayed using the Sorted by thread option. You can choose a different display option by clicking on any of the other three links. Let's look at what each one does.

Places and Topics
You may be wondering about the difference between a Topic and a Place, but in fact, there is no real difference at all. Normally, when setting up 'general' chat areas, Villagers will set up various Topics and give them titles like The High Street or The Green Dragon Pub. In this way, they sound like places within a real Village, and this adds to the sense of community. However, a place is, simply, just another name for a Topic.

Topic tree
Clicking the Topic tree link will display the entire Village in a way that is based on a tree-like structure. The various topics are arranged in such a way that they make up the branches of the tree, with each posting becoming a 'leaf' off the topic 'branch'. Many newcomers to the Village regard the Topic tree as something of a mystery, but it can be quite interesting to see how everything fits together! If you click the Topic tree you'll see something like the following:
[The Topic tree]
The Topic tree can get very big, so don't be surprised if you have to scroll up and down a lot to see it all! What this is telling you is how Topics branch off into others. If you study the diagram, you'll see that the topics HELP!, Uptown and The high street each branch off the main 'root' of the tree - namely Village map. Look at the Uptown topic - it has branched off into The Big Wigwam, and this, in turn, has branched off to Notices and Debating Chamber. These have branches of their own, and so the tree continues to spread out, covering the whole village.

Recent posts

Using the Recent posts option will show you all the posts on the entire site, but sorted in such a way as to show you the most recent posts first. This option, along with Recent topics, give the Village a more 'standard' feel when compared to other internet forums. If you're used to another forum, you may want to experiment with the two options. If you do use this option, the screen will change to show individual messages, like this one:
[A single recent post]
As you can see, they look a little bit different from the one in Area C, above. Each one includes it's Navigation Path, shown as a series of small links at the top of the message. This tells you whereabouts in the Village the message is situated. For example, the message above has been posted in a topic called Congratulations Fred!. That topic is inside The newsagent's, which is in The high street, which is in Village map. In fact, if you go back and study the Topic tree picture, aboue, you should be able to spot how the Congratulations Fred! topic fits in to the bigger picture.

Recent topics

The Recent topics option works in a similar way to Recent posts, but as you might guess, is based on topics rather than posts. It will show you all the topics on the site, but sorted in such a way as to show you which ones contain the most recent posts. If you use this option, the screen will change to a list of Topics, like this one:
[A single recent post]
As you can see, they look a little bit different again. The Navigation Path is still there (and works just like before), but the message has now gone and has been replaced with a link to the Topic.

Sorted by thread

Using the Sorted by thread option can often give you the best of both worlds. Using this link will result in a page that looks just like our opening example at the top of this page. Area A will contain the page information; Area B will contain the Topics within this thread; Area C will contain the messages for this thread.
In our example, the current Topic is the Debating chamber. It contains two topics within it - Elections and The constitution - and these are shown in Area B. A single message has been posted into the Debating chamber, and this is shown in Area C. In addition, if you want to see the contents of the Elections topic, for example, just click on the link.

Navigation

The navigation links are alongside the Display options. Here's area A again, but we've highlighted the Navigation Path to make it more obvious:
[A typical navigation path]
As you can see, the path is made up of Village map, Uptown, The Big Wigwam and (on the next line) Debating chamber. This is again showing that the Debating chamber topic is inside the The Big Wigwam, inside Uptown, inside the Village map. Notice that they are all links - you can click any of these and be taken to the relevant topic.

Area B - Places and Topics

Here's Area B again:
[Some typical topics]
It displays the Places and Topics that are contained within the current thread. Have a close look at the Elections topic. You can see that alongside the link are a couple of helpful statistics, namely the number of posts it contains, and the number of other topics it contains. If you want to actually see these posts or topics, all you have to do is click the Elections link.
In the next column is the Creator of the Topic; in our example, a user named "T-Rex" created both the Elections topic, and The constitution topic. The date and time this took place is shown underneath. Helpfully, the system provides you with a link that allows you to E-Mail the user. When you click the user's name, the system will open the E-Mail page. You can read more about this feature in the The Deaf Village EMail Guide.
Finally, the Last post column shows the name of the last user to post a message in that topic. As before, the date and time this took place is shown underneath, and you may click the user's name to send them an E-Mail.

Area C - Messages

Finally, we come to Area C. This is showing a single message and although we'll go into some depth about posting in The Deaf Village Posting Guide, a brief outline is given below.
[A typical message]
The first column, Poster, is showing which user made the posting; in this case Dale, the Village Caretaker. The date and time of his post is also shown, as is the total number of posts he has made (903), and how many topics he has started (143).
Next to this is the Status column. In this instance, it is showing the "Old Post" icon - [The Old Post icon] - but if the system had thought that you had not yet read this message, it would have put the "New Post" icon there instead, like this: [The New Post icon]
Following that is the Actions column. This column can have quite a few icons in it - and we'll cover them all in the posting guide - but to keep things simple for now, just the Reply icon is shown. As you might guess, if you click this, you'll be taken to the Message Reply page, and you can post a reply to the message.
Finally, in the last column, you can see the text of the message itself.

What Next?

Now you've learnt all about how to get about the place, it won't be long before you'll want to join in and make a posting. When you're new at these things, it all seems like a big deal - but don't despair, read The Deaf Village Posting Guide, make a posting, and join in!
Alternatively, you might feel confident enough to jump right in at the deep end. OK then! Go to The Village.