We’ve added some new features to Planet Hunters Talk in the early Fall that you might not be aware of. For our new volunteers, Talk is our forum/discussion tool where you can share your thoughts about light curves you’ve classified and interact with other members of the Planet Hunters community.
If you haven’t been to Talk before you can get to the site in two ways – one by directly going to http://talk.planethunters.org/ or when you’re classifying a lightcurve and answer “yes” to “Would you like to discuss this star?”. When you answer “yes”, you are brought to the dedicated page for that specific light curve you classified on Talk where you can write a 140 character comment, add a twitter-like hashtag, or start a side discussion. Talk also allows you to collect similar light curves together in collections.If you’re new to Talk or just want a refresher, we’ve added a brief tutorial which you can find here.
I wanted to share some of the new features that have been added a few months ago that you might not be taking advantage of. One of our new features is emoticons 🙂 . The other is “Watched Discussions.” For any discussion on talk you want to stay up to date on, you can now receive emails when there is a new response posted including the text from the posted message.
For all discussions on Talk below the title you’ll see a link labeled “watch discussion.” By clicking that link the thread will be automatically added to your account’s “watched discussion” list, and you will immediately start receiving emails when there is a new post. This feature exists both for the message boards and for side discussions about specific light curves/stars.
You can find out what discussions you are watching and will receive emails for by going to your profile page. From there you can also change your preferences and remove or modify the list. If you move your mouse over the Account button on the top right of the Talk website, you’ll get a menu that includes the link to your account profile. Click on “Profile’ and from there you can change your preferences and the discussions you are following
Once you’re on your profile page – you’ll see options to enable/disable receiving email as well as the ability to remove Talk threads from your Watched Discussions” list.
