Group discussions are a great place to participate in conversations. If you click on the name of a group you belong to, you’ll be taken to the group home page. At the top of the left-hand menu on the home page, you should see a link marked Discussion:

Here’s how a typical discussion might look on the Commons:

Under Topic, you can see the existing topics that people are talking about. This discussion has eleven topics. Topics are organized by date, the most recently changed or created post appearing at the top of the list. Discussions with many topics are split into pages for ease of navigation.

Writing in Discussions

You can create a new topic in the editor box at the bottom of the page, which looks like this:

You’ll need to give your topic a title, and then add your first post. When you’re done, click Submit at the bottom of the page, and you have a new topic. You can also access this text editor by clicking the New Topic button at the top of the page (this will bring you to the bottom of the page).

One other thing you’ll notice in the screenshot above: there’s a drop-down box at the bottom left labeled Topic Type. You’ll only see this if you’re a group administrator. But if you have this, you can choose to make a topic sticky. That means it always appears at the top of the list of topics, even if something newer has been posted. You might use this for administrative topics.