The Discussions section offers a great way to practice and improve your foreign language skills. You can discuss any topic of interest to you, find people to converse with and get answers to questions from members of our community.

Discussion Rating

Each discussion has its own rating. The rating is comprised of the total number of positive and negative votes from users. The most interesting discussion topic achieves the highest rating while the least interesting topic earns the lowest rating.

You may vote for any discussion topic you find interesting. You may also vote against topics that do not interest you. The voting process not only changes the rating of the discussion, but also manages it's order of placement within the Discussion section. The new and popular discussions can be found in the "Incoming" tab, which by default is the home page of the Discussion section. If the discussion gets a sufficiently large number of negative votes, it goes to the "Busted" tab:

Voting and user's possibilities

By participating in discussions, you can also vote for the posts of other users. Vote for those posts which you like or are interested in. If the post is unpleasant or uninteresting for you for any reason, you can vote against it.

By voting for or against the user's posts, you will affect the total number of votes gained by these users. The number of "votes" is an indicator of the extent to which the speaker is recognized within the community. In addition, the more votes you have, the more possibilities you open up:

Votes	User's possibilities
	to vote for posts*	to vote for discussions**	to insert pictures in posts	to insert video in posts
0-3	2	1	-	-
4-15	4	2	-	-
16-63	6	3		-
64-255	8	4
256-1023	10	5
1024-∞	12	6

The number of votes of the particular user and corresponding activity history can be seen in his or her profile:

Note that each person can vote a limited number of times, whether it be for the discussion rating or for the user's posts (see Table). You will have the opportunity to vote again, but only after 24 hours. So, follow these general recommendations:

Recommendations

• Be active in discussions, vote for topics and posts and get your own votes. The more votes you get, the more skillful you'll become in expressing your thoughts in a foreign language;
• Try not to create a recurrent discussion in order to avoid having the discussion sent to the "Busted" tab;
• Vote only for those discussions that you really like and against those that you strongly dislike;
• Try to participate in all the discussions that you can. If you don't know what to say, try to familiarize yourself with the theme of the discussion by reading books or searching the Internet in order to form an opinion. This will help improve your ability to express your thoughts in a foreign language;
• And, the most important thing - do not be afraid to make mistakes!

Good luck, friends!

P.S. We want to thank bigwave, Olivia_ko, Michelle and other users who helped us to create this topic.