As Steve mentioned in one of the other forums that our beloved mag "Optician" had a feature on this great board, I feel that you should all have a chance to read it :D So here it is folks...
I have edited the other site out. www.optometryonline.net
the world wide web
Simplicity is key to success
The internet has proved most useful to optometric professionals both as a
forum for an exchange of views and as a means of practice promotion.
Euan McGinty reviews two sites that show how it should be done


OptiBoard — www.optiboard.com

The OptiBoard is one of the longest running optometry sites on the internet. It is sponsored by Transitions Optical, but seems to use very little publicity to promote itself. The simplicity of the site is perhaps the key to its success. It was originally designed to serve as a discussion board, with very little preamble, minimal graphics and ease of use.
The OptiBoard was originally set up using a readily available forum programme that is free for anyone to download and use. Recently, however, things have changed. A more professional style of forum software is being used, which compared to other styles, may seem a little confusing at first. The usual format for a forum shows the subject line of member’s messages and then the replies are listed underneath that message, usually indented for each level of reply.
This creates a list in roughly chronological order, with most recent topics near the top and the threads of messages visible for each topic. This means that the whole board can be scanned through quite quickly. The down side is that if it is a large board then it takes a long time to load, and you need to make sure that it is a fresh version that you load every time, not just the one stored in the browser’s cache, so that you do not miss new messages. lb do this you simply click the refresh button on your browser, hut again for a large page this will be time consuming.
Since May 20 this year the new forums have been used and it has added a whole
new dimension to the OptiBoard. There is now a new international discussion area as well as the general discussion, marketplace and jobs board, among others. When you go into any of the discussion boards you now only see the first posting subject for any thread, which sometimes is not greatly informative, so the page loads much faster. Small icons are now used to help elaborate the style of the post and you also can see how many replies are present for each posting.
The whole site now runs more quickly, probably due to the smaller file sizes that the server has to provide, and is easier on the eye. The navigation is quite easy once you familiarise yourself with the different style. There are also additional facilities, inc tiding a chat page and the provision of members’ ICQ (I Seek You — you see!) instant messaging number (if they have them). The ICQ is a software system so that users can see when other ICQ users are online to make contact with them.
Although the content of the forums is predominantly tJS-based, it is not exclusively so and the community of users is quite friendly and welcoming to newcomers. If you do not feel confident in taking part straight away and exposing your views globally, then there is no problem with ‘lurking’ reading the forums without actually posting into them.
If there is any complaint about the OptiBoard, it is that it is freely accessible to anyone, so it is may he unadvisable to discuss financial or sensitive details.
However, there are plans to enable private forums and this may solve the problem.



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Every day a grind
Every week a bind
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