Moving Conferences and Messages

Moving Conferences

The WebBoard administrator can move conferences including all its messages, from one board to another. Perhaps a conference on a private board has generated a discussion you want to make available to others in your company. Or maybe you’ve just released a new version of a product and want to move a general conference to the board for the latest release. By moving conferences you could also combine two boards if you had overestimated the number of boards needed in setting up boards for your department.

Sometimes conference participants diverge from the designated subject matter of the conference. It may happen gradually — topic drift — or someone may mistakenly post a message to the wrong conference, perhaps by email. As a new feature in WebBoard 4, WebBoard administrators, board managers, and conference moderators can move a topic and its response messages, a group of messages, or a single message to a different conference on the same board to maintain the correct organization for the board. You can also move messages to a new topic within the same conference.

Whatever your reason for moving a conference to another board, make sure you alert all board users. To move a conference to another board, follow these steps:

Log in as the WebBoard administrator for the appropriate board.
Post a message in the conference you are going to move alerting users.
- Tell users where to go to continue participating in the conference.
- Depending on your situation, you may want to wait a few days to give board visitors a chance to see the message before continuing with step 3, or post another alert in a conference that will remain on the board.
- As an alternative, you can send email to the board participants.
On the Management Menu, Click Move Conferences. The Move Conferences page appears. (There is also a link to Move Conferences on the Manage Conferences page.)
In the Conferences list box, click the conference you want to move. You may select more than one conference to move.
Notice that the list includes conferences from all boards, not just the current board. As you become familiar with the interface for moving conferences, you will see that it is not strictly necessary to be logged into the board with the conference to be moved. You can also bring a conference from another board to the current board.
In the destination boards list box, select the board you want to move the conference to. WebBoard moves the conference and all its messages to the new board.
To see the conference in the conferences list, click Refresh on the menubar.

Note
You cannot move conferences to or from no-auth boards. No-auth boards and their conferences do not appear in the lists on the Move Conferences page.

Moving Messages

Moving topics is rather like maintaining your filing system: you are filing misfiled messages in the correct conference. In addition to moving an entire topic, you can move a single messages or cut into the middle of the thread of topic messages, moving the selected message and all messages below it. In addition to moving messages to a different conference, you can move them to a new topic within the current conference.

To move messages to a different conference, follow these steps:

Open the topic you want to move in the message window, by clicking the conference name and the message name in the left frame.
Click Move in the menu at the top of the message (only administrators, managers, and moderators see this). The Move Messages page appears.
Choose how you want to move the message:
- "Only this message" moves only the selected message.
- "This message and all replies to it" moves the selected message and all replies to that message.
- "Entire topic" moves all the messages in the topic containing the selected message.
Choose a destination conference from the list. Note that:
- You can move only to conferences in the current board.
- You can select the current conference, allowing you to move messages to a new topic in the same conference.
- Moderators can choose only those conferences where they have moderator privileges.
If you want to change the topic name, type the name in the Topic field. To keep the name the same, leave this field blank. Do change the topic name if you are moving a message to create a new topic in the same conference. Otherwise, you will have two topics with the same name. Note that changing the name will cause all messages in the moved thread to have the same name.
Click Move to move the messages.