1. Clicking link to discussion page, goes to google groups page for "gosporttalkbook".
2. Need to "sign in" with gmail account that has been added to this group by group administrator.
3. Click "New Topic" if starting a new discussion.
4. Enter topic "Subject" , topic description at bottom of window (ie: question or statement on book), then hit "Post".
5. To add a post to this new topic, click on it then click on "Reply". Highlight the test that automatically gets put in the text box and delete it (this clutters up the post, cannot find out if can unselect autotext anywhere). Then type in the body of the post, and hit "Post".
6. The new post appears under the body of the topic. You can then log out and log in as a different user, and create more posts. Obviously usually create posts as one user. Posts from different users appear in chronological order as one thread. The user names appear above the body of the posts.
7. That is it for basic use of Google Groups Forum. More tips are:
Can click topic Reply as described above, or can use "Post Reply" button to add a new post to the topic.
Click the down arrow to the right of the topic title, to show the display options for the topic. "Discussion" and "Chronological" are the defaults, and are best suited to this type of forum.
Above the title of the post is the Return button to go back to the list of topic.s Useful thing I missed for some reason as expected standard close x button.
If the Google Groups Forum occasionally produces unexpected messages, just discard the topic or post, or log out and log back into google.
Twitter, Facebook etc have private groups I think, but both have restrictions. I do not know of any discussion forum application that improves on topic then chronological posts format, replying to replies ends up with a tree like mess. Better to start a new topic if get "off topic". If you look at Twitter discussions (?) they often end up as spreading out into unconnected rants if more than two people.