Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Using study forums 107 
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 SUBSCRIBING TO FORUMS 
Many forums will have subscription options. Te software will let 
you tick a box or click on a link to “subscribe”. Tis will add you to 
a mailing list that sends out notifcations of forum posts to your 
email inbox. When you subscribe, it means that you avoid missing 
out on what is taking place in the forum. However, you can also 
get annoyed by all the repetitive email messages which merely tell 
you about a forum post that says “Tank you” when someone re-
sponds to a comment, for example. 
One way out of this is to create a flter in your email system. If 
you are unsure how to do this, check out the help fles for your 
particular email program. For example, popular email programs 
such as Apple Mail, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook all provide 
methods of fltering emails. You could set up a flter to divert all 
the emails from the forum subscription service into a specifc mail 
folder. You would then only check that folder when you wanted to, 
perhaps on a daily basis. Tis would avoid you being constantly 
interrupted but would also mean that you were always aware of 
what was happening in the forum. 
An alternative to this is to use RSS feeds. RSS stands for “Real-
ly Simple Syndication”, though, frankly, it is only “really simple” 
for computer engineers ...! For the rest of us, it is just a method 
of collecting information from a variety of sources. Many forums 
produce an RSS feed. Tis provides you with the entire output of 
the forum, which is automatically updated each time something 
new is added. Te way to make this work is to get an RSS Reader 
program. Popular ones include Feedly or Feedspot, which both 
have free options. 
To use these RSS readers, you add the RSS feed from your forum 
as a subscription to your chosen reader program. In Feedly, for 
instance, you just press the button saying “Create new feed”. Ten 
you enter the address of your RSS feed from the forum (just copy 
and paste). Te RSS reader then collects the information from the 

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