This post is a manual that tries to cover most things you might want to do on the Forum, with emphasis on things that are tricky or unintuitive. (It’s adapted and expanded from an older post called “How to use the Forum.”)

Some of these things are only possible when you’re logged into an account on the Forum, but it’s very easy to make an account.

Key Forum resources:

Please let us know in the comments or at forum@effectivealtruism.org if this post is missing something you think it should include!

Table of contents

Getting started with the Forum
1. The Frontpage
2. Karma and voting
3. Forum accounts
4. The EA Wiki & other resources
5. Getting feedback on your writing
6. Getting help (& who runs the Forum)
Writing and publishing posts
1. Two different editors: WYSIWYG and Markdown
2. Inserting things into your writing
3. Publishing a post
4. Your first post won’t appear on the Frontpage straight away
5. Adding co-authors to a post
6. Types of writing on the Forum (not everything is a “post”)
Once something has been published
1. Tagging posts
2. Putting together sequences of posts
3. Seeing post metrics or analytics
4. Spam and other things we remove
5. Moderators
Finding and engaging with content
1. Customizing the Frontpage with tags
2. Subscribing to mailing lists and newsletters
3. Other views of posts on the Forum
4. Bookmarking content
5. Looking at your past upvotes
6. Following users
Other things you can do on the Forum
1. Events, groups, and community spaces
2. Report something to the moderators
3. Give feedback, suggest features, or report bugs
Credits

Getting started with the Forum

The Frontpage

When you go to forum.effectivealtruism.org, you see what’s called the “Frontpage.” This shows you a bunch of recent posts (posts that are more upvoted by Forum users stay at the top for longer), some recommended posts from the Forum’s history, and “Recent discussion,” which shows comments and new posts in purely chronological order of posting.

If you’re logged in, you can also customize what you see on your frontpage. See the appropriate section here.

Karma and voting

Karma is similar to “likes” on other platforms and is inspired by Reddit. When you upvote posts and comments, you give their authors karma points (or take away points when you downvote). On the Frontpage, higher-rated posts are more visible.

For content you think is espec...