Post types

Microblogging

Use the Add Post tab to add short messages, known as "microblogs", to the activity streams of those following you.

Your message can be up to 1900 characters long, and can be enhanced using @-targets, hashtags, links, and file attachments.

Users can Comment on your post or Like, Share, Follow Up and View your post.

Questions

The Ask a Question tab allows entry of a question, which gains higher visibility (via notifications) and has different available responses than a regular microblog post.

Instead of a comment option, colleagues can reply with an answer. The initial poster can mark any number of the responses as answers; they can also unmark them and delete them.

Polls

The Ask a Question tab also allows entry of a poll, by clicking the bargraph icon below where the question is typed.

This opens a set of text boxes into which poll answers can be typed.

Users see these options for poll answers in the post, and check the box of the poll answer they want directly in the Activity Stream.

After any of the choices have been picked, the poll displays the choices in order of the most- selected to least-selected options. It does not indicate who else has voted, nor how.

It does show bars indicating the percentage of the vote each option has received, and shows the number of actual votes received by any option when you mouse over it. Users can swap their poll choice at any time.

Polls do not have a mark as answer function, and the Answer link that normally appears for questions is a Comment link for polls.

The activity stream web part contains a specific filter for polls.

Private Messages

Use the Private Message tab to create a post that will only be seen by the person you @ target. For further details, see @ Targeting in the topic Crafting posts.

You can begin typing a regular post, then decide to change it to a private message by clicking the Private Message tab.

The background turns yellow and a lock icon appears to the right to make it more obvious when you're typing a private versus a public message.

You must target at least one person to send a private message, but you cannot target groups.

Before they can widen the audience for your message, however, they will see a warning that the message will no longer be private.

Sharing

Most user posts, and some other activity stream items, contain a Share link.

You can access this by clicking the More link in any post. Click Share to rebroadcast an item. A dialog box allows you to enter an optional prepended message.

The share is considered to be a new microblog message from you that, in most cases, is public.

Everyone who follows you can see it in their main stream, and anyone you specify by an @ target. If you @ target a private community, it appears only in that community.

Before version 3.0, shares taken from a community would appear in the originating item's community. This only happens when done from the community site itself, and if the share targets a private community, only when the global option Enforce preservation of activity event privacy is not set.

The Share feature has been reworked in version 5.1. Sharing no longer creates a new item, it just makes the existing stream item visible to all of your followers and adds your text as a comment.