The Surly Admin

Using Spiceworks Forums

Wanted to do a light, non-Powershell post today about the Spiceworks forums.

Background

As you may have noticed, I use Spiceworks as my script repository.  There are a few of reasons for this, partly I’ve been a part of the Spiceworks community for a few years now and want to continue to support it.  Partly because I get Spice “points” for everyone who downloads my scripts.  Partly because I like the way Spiceworks saves the different versions of the scripts and even has a changelog.  But also, I love watching the forums at Spiceworks and helping anyone asking questions that I can!  I’ve become a better IT Professional by my involvement in the community and I highly encourage you to participate too–even if you don’t use the Spiceworks software.

Spiceworks has worked really hard to make their portal very Facebook like, and to improve the general usefulness of their interface.  And to be honest, they still have a long way to go!  But there is one little trick for watching a forum that I use–and this was the original way you followed thing, before they had the “follow” capability–that makes it really easy to watch your favorite forums.

When you go to a forum at Spiceworks, towards the top, you’ll see a button called “Subscribe”.  Click on that and you’ll receive an email everytime someone posts a new topic in that group.  I then go to my Email client and set a rule that anything from @Spiceworks.com is put into a folder that I can review whenever I want.  It’s as simple as that.  When you reply to a topic, you’ll be automatically “subscribed” to that topic and any new posts that go into it you’ll get an email.

This can mean a lot of emails, of course, but you don’t have to go into the web page and scroll through everything.  If the topic looks interesting you can click on it.  If it doesn’t, just delete it and move on.

Signing Up

I’ve had a few people sign up to Spiceworks to get scripts, and I–and the crew at Spiceworks–really appreciate it, but I’d like to make one small request!  If you do decide to sign up, click on the Spiceworks icon on my home page.  This is a reference link and gives me credit when you sign up!

IT Programming

By the way, if you do sign up make sure to visit the IT Programming and Powershell forums (I’m one of the group admins for IT Programming) and check in.  A lot of interesting things going on there.

December 6, 2012 - Posted by Martin9700 | General | spiceworks