Introduction:

Welcome to the Admin course, designed for COs, XOs, and GMs to get them acquainted with the functions of the administrative menu. There is no exam to take, or grade to worry about. This course simply goes through the functions of the administrative menu one by one, examining them in detail.
Now, if you look on the ship's motd, along the top right-hand side, you will see 3 brand new tabs("Admin", "Edit" and "E-mail"), we will examine the functions of each of these new tabs in detail throughout this course.
Lesson One: The Tabs
Before we go into a lot of detail, it's time to discuss the basic functions of these three new tabs.
Admin: The place COs/XOs and GMs go to add new characters, view all characters on the ship, create log entries and add and remove subscribers as well as a few other functions that will be discussed in greater detail over the next few pages of the course.
Edit: This is where you can edit the motd, both the basic look of it and simply updating your own special section of it. You need to be familiar with html coding as well as other codes that may be employed in the maintenance of the motd. If only to avoid undoing someone's hard work by accidently deleting code.
E-mail: Sends a mass e-mail to all subscribers on your board. Not recommended for use, it may be a good idea to simply ignore this and carry on. Generally, if you need to reach all the members of your crew, it would probably be easiest to simply post a note on the ship regarding it rather than to spam everyone who has happened to subscribe to your board.

Lesson Two: Characters - Editing & Creating

The first two options under the Admin tab will be discussed together as they are related.

Character List:

As quoted from the admin tab itself "A complete list of all characters on this board, rostered and not." This list is your full roster, including AWOLed and unrostered characters, unrostered NPCs, unrostered GM Controlled Characters, etc.
This section allows you to see the "sort order" of every character on the ship. Sort order sets the order in which the character displays on the roster, without sort order, every character is organized alphabetically by character name. COs can organize characters however they wish(as an XO or GM, you may want to adhere to the sort orders to keep your CO happy).

In order to organize a character via sort order, you need to edit that character. In order to edit a character, as an administrator of your board, you can click on that character name either on the roster or in the Character List option under the admin tab and then click on the "edit" tab in the top right corner of the window. You'll be provided with many wonderful functions, you can essentially re-write the character(but it's rather rude to do that don't you think? Especially when it's not your own character!). The only options you should be touching really depends on who you are, but the following are the only options that anyone outside of the actual author of the character can touch:

Rank: Obviously as CO, you'll occasionally see the need to promote people. This permits you to select their rank from a drop down menu. A reminder, as CO you can only promote to the rank of Lt. Commander. In order to promote to Commander, you require your FComm's permission(Unless of course that member already has a membership rank above that).

Position & Custom Position: Again, typically COs only use this function, but occasionally an XO may be given permission by the CO to use this. Position is another drop-down menu, with all the standard positions organized by department. Note, the CNS is located under the medical department and the CTO is located under the security department.

If you have a unique swing position on your ship(ie: a lot of alt-RPGs are in this situation, but some standard ships can have these too), you'll be using the "custom position" option, which is a dialog box permitting you to type in whatever you please.

Rostered: This option is a drop down menu that permits you to choose whether or not that character displays on the public roster that is viewable by everyone(That character will still display on your administrative roster). You may also be using this tab to unroster an AWOL player for a period before deleting them completely from the roster.

Sort-Order: This option permits you to select the order in which that character displays on the roster. You can assign more than one person to the same sort order. For example, if you have five Lieutenants on the ship, you can assign them all "4" and they'll appear after those at level 1, 2, and 3, but will display alphabetically within their "order".

Create New Character:

Clicking this will bring you back to the already familiar character edit screen, only it'll be completely blank. Assign all the information you have on the new character by filling in the boxes(typically Rank, Position, Character Name, Rostered, Sort Order).
At the bottom, you'll need to ensure you choose the proper "owner" of the character. In order to do this, you'll need to know the username of the person you wish to add.

When editing and creating characters, you have the option to preview your changes/creation by clicking "preview" instead of "submit". On the preview screen, your changes appear right at the top, with the regard submit character boxes down below. In order for changes to be made permanent on your ship, you need to click "submit".

Lesson Three: Subscribers

This lesson involves the last two options under the Admin tab, Subscribers and Add Subscribers.

In order to post on a ship, you need to be a subscriber of that ship(You can read all the notes you want as a non-subscriber).

Subscribers:

This page will permit you to see who can make a post on your ship and allow you to assign administrators to that ship. Typically this is the FComm, AFComm, CO, XO and GM of the ship. To create an administrator, you simply click on the "Admin:Create" link and follow the prompts.

The same is true for the "remove" option, this permits you to remove subscribers, for instance if you have a member who is no longer a member of your ship, you have the option of removing them, it's not necessary, but some COs may wish to clean up their subscriber lists on occasion.

Add Subscribers:

To add a subscriber to your ship, you merely need to click this option from the admin tab, you're taken to a dialog box.
You can add multiple users by separating each with a comma and as with the character creation, you need to know the user name of the person you wish to add.

Once all the names are typed in, you click submit and you're done.

Lesson Four: Log Entries, Notes & Pages

The last three options on the admin tab will be discussed together.
Create new Log Entry: Clicking this brings you to a dialogue screen where you type in what you want to say in your log and hit submit, that's then uploaded to the log entries where you and everyone else can read it.

Create New Note: Preforms the same function as "Post Note" option does at the bottom of the motd.

Create New Page: A redundant section that mostly repeats what we've discussed earlier. Creating new characters, new notes, etc.

Lesson Five: The Edit Tab

The edit tab, as discussed in lesson one, requires a knowledge of html coding.

Three dialogue boxes are listed in this tab:

Slogan: A brief description for the group details block and group directory. ie: "The USS Columbia is a Discovery Class Vessel that has been training cadets since 2003."

MOTD: This is where you put all your essentials, coding the CO, XO, GM sections, the Departmental orders, etc. Uses mainly html coding.

CSS: Permits you to assign CSS codes, useful to educate yourself on CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) as it permits you to for example make all your headings colored blue and all your main text white. Saves you time if you have say ten headers that all need to be blue, you can code them once here and it'll be applied to all of them.

With the edit tab, you can preview any minor changes to the motd by clicking "preview" before you click "submit"(Which makes your changes permanent). However if you are completely changing the look of the motd, preview will not work.

Conclusion

We have been through all the different options of the three tabs that appear once you've been made an administrator of a ship or board.
It's always a good idea to read over all your changes before clicking submit, it helps eliminate most of those dastardly typos which could wreak havoc on your poor motd!

Most of all, don't be discouraged if you make mistakes, we may play aliens in this club, but all of us are human and mistakes are part of that. There is nothing wrong with spotting a mistake after the fact, the Admin tabs are forgiving, you can just pop right back into the tab you need and correct that mistake easily enough. Don't be afraid to ask for help either.

Last and most importantly, congratulations and good luck with your new post, no doubt you've worked very hard for it and you deserve it! If you have any questions of the contents of this course, please contact the commandant(acad@star-fleet.com).

Thanks for reading my course!

And thank you to the following people who have graciously assisted me in producing that I hope was a very productive and relevant course for you:

-Robin Bird
-Jen Herr

And a thank you to the previous author and contributors to the course for writing a comprehensive look at our old system's administrative menu, this course is vastly different from the old course of course, but I did use the previous course as a beginning template when I first started the re-write of this one.

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Reposted from before, but I've added the preview options(I think I got all the areas that you can preview things, if not, speak up and I shall add it in LOL), and I've re-written the conclusion a bit(I'll probably fine tune it, but maybe I'm just overly critical of myself).

I'd ideally like to have any comments made on this within two weeks(by Feb 21st), so I can get this course updated(and sent to the Librarian) and off our list of things to do, but if it takes longer, then it simply will have to take longer. :)

Kat