How to navigate this group

[Songbird]

Hola, friends. You're probably here because a) of an accidental mouse click, or b) you'd like to know how to use the features of this forum. Here are some tips:

1. Star your favorite discussions for quick access. Click the outline of the star next to specific discussions. All of your starred discussions will be saved under the ‘Starred’ section in the main menu at the left.
2. Change your discussions view. On a Group homepage, click on the standard  or compact  tab at the top menu to change how the discussions are listed:
3. View individual discussions in ‘Tree’ mode. Click the discussion you would like to view. Then click the ‘Tree’  tap at the top next to the refresh button. If you don’t like the look you can switch back by clicking the ‘Flat’ view to the right of it.
4. Give yourself a nickname. Under any group’s page, select My Membership next to the group’s name. Look for ‘Display name’ at the bottom of the pop up window, and type in a nickname next to ‘Use this nickname.’
5. Stop the emails; view discussions from the web. Click My Membership > No Email.  See attached screenshot. Also go here for more information.

Enjoy!

[Aardwizz]

I can't seem to figure out how to reply to a a reply, instead of to just the OP.  I've tried using the "Reply to author" feature, but that only seems to send an email to just that one person, not a message for the group to share.  What I want is a "Click here to reply" under each post, so that the "tree mode" can become really branchy..

This forum seems built on the "I'm having this problem; does anyone know how to fix it?" style, where the OP asks a question, everyone chimes in with suggestions, and the "Right Answer" is marked as "Complete".  That's OK, but I was hoping for something different.

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[Songbird]

Does the reply arrow to the right of a message work? That's how I replied to this question. Let's see what happens....

[Songbird]

Testing branchiness.

[Aardwizz]

Stupid me.    

Instead of clicking on the ARROW, I clicked on the pulldown menu.   Usually pulldown menus have ALL the options (including "Reply to Post"), but Google is all about minimalism, and so don't have redundancies.

Thanks, songbird.

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[Songbird]

It's not intuitive. I don't like the navigation so far. I'd like to have the topics expand without going to a separate page. Grr.

[Songbird]

If anyone has tips for navigation, please share!

[Aardwizz]

I'm using "tree view", and it appears that posts work more-or-less the way you want, expanding and collapsing.  I'm also using Chrome as my browser for this, since it's a Google site.  Not sure how IE or Firefox will handle it.  (I've learned that when operating Microsoft based websites, like Outlook Web Access (for work email) or Sharepoint, that it works best if you use Microsoft IE for those.  I'd hope Google isn't as evil as MS (it's in their mission statement, after all), but as long as I've got it....

One thing I do, when I see that there is a new post (marked by a number after the "Philosophy and ...." in the left pane)  is I click on that, which shows me all the categories.  Then I click on "Show all topics" on the upper right.  Now I can see where the new message is hiding.

As the list of posts becomes long, it may be necessary to apply filters (top middle button) to weed out the older threads.  Of course, the filters settings don't seem to be a savable feature.

I agree that it's not intuitive, nor as powerful as one could hope.

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