Forum usage tips

[mikeheck]

Daily Digest
OK, you probably don't want to login to the Open Inventor forums every day just to check for new messages...

The solution is to request a daily or weekly email digest. A digest is a summary of all the new posts that day or that week.

Currently you have to request a digest separately for each forum:

• On the home page, click to enter the forum, e.g. "News".
  Or if you're already in a forum, use the Forum Jump pulldown at the bottom of the page.
• Click on Forum Tools in the "Threads in Forum" banner and select Subscribe to This Forum.
• Use the pulldown to select Daily updates ... or Weekly updates ....
• Click the Add Subscription button.

or use...

RSS Feed
You can also request an RSS feed that delivers a message whenever a new thread is created. The RSS message normally includes the text of the post. RSS notifications are not generated for new posts to an existing thread.

Enter the following link in your RSS reader:

http://www.mc3dviz.com/openinventor-....php?type=rss2

Search
Looking for something in particular? We encourage you to browse the various sections in the forum, but also try the forum's powerful search features. You can search the entire forum or search within one thread. At the top level of the forum click "Search" on the top menu bar to access:

• Text search - Displays threads or inidividual posts containing your search terms.
• Tag search - Conveniently displays all the tags assigned and shows how often they've been used.
• Advanced search - Allows you to include or exclude threads according to various criteria, and so on.

Uploading Files
To save yourself time, make a note that the only file extensions the forum currently allows to be uploaded are:

bmp, doc, gif, jpe, jpeg, pdf, png, psd, txt, zip

If you try to upload a file with an invalid extension, like ".cxx", it just fails quietly (no error message). Why .cxx files are considered more dangerous than .doc files, I don't know.

File size limits: Please note there is a size limit for each file type and the forum will not accept larger files. The limits are displayed in the upload window.
If you need to post a larger file, for example a (zipped) .iv file to demonstrate a problem, here are two commonly used options:

• Use a free online file storage service, e.g. www.dropbox.com, and post a link to the file.
• Use ftp to upload the file to ftp://ftp.vsg3d.com/incoming and post the name of the file.
  Note that you will not have permission to list the contents of this directory and there are also (relatively large) size limits on incoming files.

Post does not appear
If you post and it does not appear, possibly you have just registered and your registration has not been approved yet. All registration requests are reviewed by the forum administrator, who is on Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8). This is necessary because of the large volume of registration requests from bots and spammers. Please be patient. You should receive an approval email. If you don't receive this within 24 hours, please send a private message to the administrator.

Note that email addresses with a suspicious name, domain or IP address may be rejected for the good of the other members. Please use a "professional" name and your business email address.

If you post and it does not appear, possibly the post has been trapped by the automatic spam filter. This filter checks each new post using a set of regular expressions. This is unfortunately necessary to protect the forum. Generally it works quite well and "false positives" are rare. If you suspect this problem, please send a private message to the forum administrator. Note that suspicious posts are trapped, not deleted, and the administrator can release a post after review. The most common cause of trapping is including C++/C#/Java source code in the post without using the "CODE" tag. For example, this should be safe:
[CODE]
SoSeparator *pRoot = new SoSeparator();
[/CODE]
and appears like this:

    SoSeparator *pRoot = new SoSeparator();

Formatting posts
General information about this is available in the forum FAQ here.
A convenient summary list of BB codes is available here.