Forum Instructions

Welcome to the Sacramento Home Winemakers forum page. This allows club members to discuss various aspects of wine grape growing, wine making and wine-related activities (how about travel through different wine regions). To make the most of these instructions, open a second internet window where you will work directly with the forum.

Navigate to the SHW homepage (http://sachomewine.com). Locate and click on the tab titled SHW MEMBER FORUM. It will take you to a page similar to the following:

The discussions are divided along three primary groupings: grape growing (viticulture), winemaking (enology), and everything else. Note that the discussions do not take place directly in the three categories of grape growing, winemaking, and/or everything else. The discussions take place in the lower level forms such as Planting as shown, above.

When scrolling down the forum page, you will see all the active discussions taking place.

To Contribute to an Existing/On-going Forum Discussion

In the example, below, there is an entry found at Winemaking (Enology) > Equipment > Vinmetrica SO2 Analyzer Reviews.

In this case you would click on Vinmetrica SO2 Analyzer Reviews to open the discussion. You would find something similar to this (note that this is a condensed snapshot, what you will find is much longer):

Depending upon who has responded to the post, you should see two buttons, ADD A COMMENT and ANSWER. These are context sensitive meaning that they apply to the text/information immediately next to them. It is important to pay attention to this as your formulate your response. IF you want to add a comment to an existing answer, click on ADD A COMMENT which is adjacent to what you want to comment. If instead you want to answer the original question posed, click on ANSWER. In either case, you will be presented with a dialog box to type your response. While not intuitive, after typing your ANSWER, you must again press the ANSWER button for your response to be accepted. Likewise, for a comment, after typing your comment, you must again press the ADD A COMMENT button for your comment to be accepted.

Introducing a New Forum Discussion Topic/Question

Say you’ve searched the forum and cannot find the topic you want to discuss. You can create a new forum discussion topic as follows. Navigate to the forum which most closely matches your discussion topic (e.g. Planting, Pruning, Equipment, Sourcing Wine Grapes, etc.). In the example, below, the site has navigated to HOME > GRAPE GROWING (VITICULUTRE) > PRUNING:

Note in the example, above, the tab labeled Ask a question. The resulting pop-up window will ask you two main questions…a short title for your question (and keep it short!) and a longer description of your question. It is recommended that you click on Subscribe to this question to enable automatic email updates to you when others respond to your question. Remember to click on Ask a question one more time to make the system accept your entry.

Subscribing to Forums and Discussions

As you peruse through the forum, you will most likely come across forums (e.g. Planting, Pruning, Equipment, Red Wine, etc.) or individual discussions (e.g. Vinmetrica SO2 Analyzer Reviews) in which you want to receive notification in your email when new messages posted there, either answers to existing posts or new questions. In either case, drill down to either the forum level or the question level as illustrated in the two examples, below.

Forum Level:

Discussion level:

In each of the examples, above, note the buttons labeled Subscribe for new topics and Subscribe for new replies, respectively. If you click on these buttons, you will receive email notification when new information is posted on the site for these forums or discussions. If at some point you should want to stop receiving email updates, drill down and find the corresponding Unsubscribe button.

Subscribing to a Category

Subscribing to a forum (e.g. Planting, Pruning, Equipment, Red Wine, etc.) or individual discussions (e.g. Vinmetrica SO2 Analyzer Reviews) is relatively easy as outlined, above. Subscribing to one of the three categories (Grape Growing (Viticulture), Winemaking (Enology), or Everything Else) is not as straightforward. As of this writing, this is the only method known to subscribe to a category.

Within the category you want to subscribe (e.g. Grape Growing (Viticulture)), click on any of the child forums (e.g. Pruning). You should see something similar to the following:

Find the image of the house immediately below the word Forums. Click on the words Grape Growing immediately to the right of the house. You should now see something similar to the following:

Note the button labeled Subscribe for new topics. If you click on this button, you will receive email notification when new information is posted on the site for this category. If at some point you should want to stop receiving email updates, follow this same procedure and click on the Unsubscribe button.