VMware Communities : Document List - Communities Website Feedback

VMware Communities FAQs

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:50:01 GMT

Embedding YouTube videos made easy

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:32:27 GMT

Hello Community Members,

Did you know that you can easily embed a YouTube video (with link to the source) in messages/threads, documents, and blog posts, on VMware Communities? Simply place the tag "youtube" within braces before and after the YouTube video link, as illustrated below:

{youtube}your_YouTube_video_link{youtube}

Therefore,

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7O4uMRADB8{youtube}

would give you:

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7O4uMRADB8{youtube}

Example within a blog: Embedding YouTube videos made easy

Example within a discussion thread: @ Developer Day Sessions: Introduction to vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0 and NewFeatures

Badsah Mukherji, VMware Web Communities Team

Twitter: Micro-blogging with VMware and Virtualization Experts

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:58:07 GMT

FAQ: Beta Registration Issues, Profiles, and Email Addresses

Wed, 28 May 2008 20:49:53 GMT

(If you're still having problems after reading this document, please send a Private Message to Corey_R.)

Registration: Store & Communities versus Beta Programs

Some VMware beta programs, such as Workstation 6.5 Beta and ACE 2.5 Beta, require one-time registration. Beta program registration, in turn, requires a Store log-in AND VMware Communities membership. Depending on your individual situation, you may have to go through one to three steps to join such a beta program community, and access the software download.

Why am I asked to enter my registration info when I have already done so?

If you have not joined the VMware community, you will be redirected to update your VMware Store profile. The top of page looks like this:

If you arrive at the page illustrated above, please scroll down to the bottom of the page, as illustrated below, and join the VMware community:

You will need to enter your preferred community username, which must be unique, and select the radio button next to "I wish to join VMware Communities...."

After joining VMware communities you may now register for the beta programs at the following links:

~~c-2767~~
Join the ACE 2.5 Beta

Why do I get an "Unauthorized" page?

If you have not filled out the beta registration form, even after logging into an active Store account with current Communities membership, you will end up on a page like this:

You need to join the beta program by completing ~~c-2767~~ or this form for ACE 2.5 Beta.

About this Document

I would appreciate any feedback you might have to improve the usefulness of this document. Simply scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on "Add a comment."

Thanks.

Badsah

Tweak the forum cascading stylesheets in Firefox to be more comfortable

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:59:18 GMT

Somewhere in September 2007, the forum software was updated to a NEW! FLASHY! SYSTEM!
Unfortunately for me that meant, changing into an unusable system as i'm visually impaired.
Personal issues are:

the choice of colors (light blue on white captions, light gray text)
fontsize (extra small?)

This is on using firefox 2.0 (just in case that matters for the font) within linux (but this is true also for me on Windows and OS X) As someone else pointed out earlier low-fi is good.

The first workaround that I used was to use the newsfox plugin so that you can read in normal fonts without having to override any page specifics as it just shows the text in a readable format.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/629

Maybe it helps someone else as well for the time being. It doesn't allow you to post anything.. but at least one can read...

Then i had that :love to tinker: feeling again....

Okay, here's a solution for users using the firefox browser.

Disclaimer: If you use a firefox browser older as 1.0.5 then the work a round offered below will not work and you'll be best off using the following plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/563

Any firefox version after that does offer a way in which you can customize CSS on a per site bases.
This isn't really documented well... only found the way on how-to do this by trawling the firefox bugzilla entries.

Ok, first thing you need to know that in a firefox setup, there's a profile specific for each user. Beneath that folder you'll find a chrome folder which contains an example user stylesheet called userContent-example.css
This file contains examples on how you would apply custom styles to EVERY site you visit.

Clearly not what we are trying to achieve. However the mozilla css rendering engine understands an attribute called "@-moz-document"
more details can be found here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238099

So what i did was this, first create a little file:
userContent.css
that is to be stored in the same folder as the userContent-example.css

Then i added the following custom css to blow up the font a bit and make it use better contrast ratios:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://communities.vmware.com/) {
body {
font: 14px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, Bitstream Vera Sans ! important;
color: #000 ! important;
}
}

You'll have to restart the browser in order to apply the changes.

An alternative could be using greasemonkey, but the whole addon by itself is imho such a hack that i really didn't want to install it. The reason for this is that i do work on web site development at times and this is the type of addon that can render hours of work useless in such an easy way.... brrr...
The userChrome.css is normally for skinning firefox, not changing the page content layout.

The userContent.css solution is very clean - it doesn't require additional scripts to modify the DOM tree behind your back - works on any recent firefox by default, doesn't mess up any other site, doesn't depend on javascript to be enabled... etcetera...

Below you'll also find an attached zipfile which contains the edits.
This was tested on fedora 7 and 8 with the css file applied to
~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>.default/chrome

This is reported to work on Windows XP, OS X and linux

Version history:

0.7 - Removed custom css for textedit and added css to remove the "mark all as read" functionality as it is too easy to click on it (it happened to me while revising this, so i lost my thread visit history... again)

0.8 - Decreased font on body text a bit, increased on thread subject, added increased textsize on forum announcements, increased "up to <forum link>" a bit, increased fontsize in plain text editor.

This document was generated from the following thread: Impossible to read

Undocumented wiki markup tricks

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:12:15 GMT

Undocumented wiki markup

As regular forum members know, the forum has been updated a few months ago and the existing wiki markup has changed a bit, backwards compatibility was added (is still in progress maybe?) and as it appears there's shorthand markup which is not documented.
ment 1
ADDED 05-MAR-2008 by BADSAH MUKHERJI: I am attaching a PDF file containing a documented contributed to the Jive Software Developer Community. Just a supplement to this excellent document.

Since "wiki wiki" means fast, we'd like to know the shorthand code for the shorthand code (am i making sense?)
The official documentation for the wiki markup can be found under the help button in your editor, but there's more:

Here's an example where i show different markup with the same result:

Thread references

The official style for thread references is

{thread:id=121928}

Result:
Error marking answers as helpful/correct?

Shorthand style is

[t-121928]

Result:
Error marking answers as helpful/correct?

Message references

Official style for message references is

{message:id=1928}

Result:
Re: Installing Win 98 without a floppy diskette?

Shorthand style is

[m-1928]

Re: Installing Win 98 without a floppy diskette?

Document references

Official style for document references is

{document:id=2555}

Result:
Undocumented wiki markup tricks

Shorthand style is

[d-2555]

Result:
Undocumented wiki markup tricks

Using headers

The official documented way is:

h5. ABC

Beware of the space between the . and the ABC
Result:

ABC

As an alternative, you can use simple html, so to use a H5 header one simply surrounds the header with the appropriate code:

<h5>Your HEADER text</h5>

Result:

Your HEADER text

Quoting others

The official method is:

{quote} insert famous quote here {quote}
Result:

insert famous quote here

Shorthand is
> Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works. (RFC 1925)

Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.

Referencing users

Referencing users by User ID

The official method is: [Wil|~152604]
Result:
Wil

A shorthand alternative is: [~152604]
wila

Referencing users by User name

The official method is [Wil|~152604]
Result:
Wil

The shorthand alternative is: [~User_Name_]
Please note that whenever you type the username in that format, that the forum software will translate it for you in the user-reference with the user-id number after the message is send or the document has been saved. Even when instructing to not reformat. This makes it a little difficult to explain, unless we use a screen shot. Thanks WoodyZ for uncovering this and making the following screen shot.

Ordered lists

Official documentation on this one is nil.
The undocumented way of doing this is:

# This is a ordered list
## First indented jump in
## Second item
# Main item 2 on the list

Result:

This is a ordered list
1. First indented jump in
2. Second item
Main item 2 on the list

Forcing linebreaks

You can force a linebreak by inserting a double backslash

first line\\second line

Result:
first line
second line

Is it smart to use undocumented markup?

Well i only learned this by looking at how official VMware employees use the markup, so i would expect it to be safe to use. I admit that this was only the reference thread part, other markup here is found by trial and error. Unless we get the official "OK" from VMware it is up to you if you use the undocumented ones OR the documented part. See also the first comment from etung

VMware Community Moderators

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:44:00 GMT

VMware Community Moderators have committed to performing numerous functions, as authorized by the VMware Communities administration team. Often, the member moderators will confer with the VMware Communities team and vice versa, to ensure fair and appropriate decisions.

Role of Community Moderators

1. Keep the community forums and "help" documents clean. This includes:

- Move misplaced postings to the appropriate Forum.
- Find and remove threads/topics irrelevant to Virtualization or VMware.
- Remove duplicate postings.
- Point participants of a thread covering content already covered in the forum's FAQs to the FAQ applet.
- Edit new discussion SUBJECT lines to remove any BOLD, ITALICS, or EMOTICON markup that would artificially draw attention to those particular threads. (Our philosophy: all discussion threads are created equal.)

- Enforcing the COMMUNITY TERMS OF USE, and dealing appropriately with the occasional case of member misconduct. Examples of no-no's in VMware Communities:
- > Moderator bashing or baiting (publicly challenging moderation decisions).
- > Spam and certain kinds of promotion.
- > Swearing, profanity.
- > Inflammatory remarks including personal insults (see Reminder: Conduct on VMware Communities and Moderators for more on flaming). Spirited debates are welcome; flaming will not be tolerated.
- > Illegal postings such as posting software serial numbers for all to see.
- > Malicious postings such as linking to content, applications, or utilities containing viruses, trojans, or spyware; linking to or mention of serial number generators.
- > Monitoring patterns of bad behavior.

2. Take user comments and ensure attention is being paid to critical requests.

3. Help facilitate in technical discussions, and keep FAQ information in the product forums up to date.

Master List of Current Community Moderators

All have the icon next to their names. Additionally, those who are VMware employees display the VMW logo .

* RDellimmagine (VMware Web Communities team)
* Badsah (VMware Web Communities team)
* JohnTroyer (VMware Web Communities team)
* Corey_R (VMware Web Communities team)
* jeanchen (VMware Web Communities team)
* boydd
* BrianG
* Dave.Mishchenko
* dpomeroy
* esiebert7625
* jasonboche
* juchestyle
* Ken.Cline
* KevinG
* kimono
* kix1979
* Liz
* magi
* masaki
* Mike_Laverick
* MR-T
* oreeh
* RDPetruska
* sbeaver
* Texiwill
* tom howarth
* Peter_VM
* depping

Reminder: Conduct on VMware Communities and Moderators

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 01:37:52 GMT

WIKIPEDIA: "Flaming" is the hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users. Flaming usually occurs in the social context of a discussion board, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or even through e-mail. An Internet user typically generates a flame response to other posts or users posting on a site, and is usually not constructive, does not clarify a discussion, and does not persuade others. Sometimes, flamers attempt to assert their authority, or establish a position of superiority over other users. Other times, a flamer is simply an individual who believes he or she carries the only valid opinion. This leads him or her to personally attack those who disagree. Occasionally, flamers wish to upset and offend other members of the forum, in which case they can be called "trolls". Most often however, flames are angry or insulting messages transmitted by people who have strong feelings about a subject.

Hello, Community Members,

I am the new Sr. Community Manager for VMware Communities, working with Robert Dell'Immagine, John Troyer, and Eric Nielsen. I am excited to be at VMware, and to be part of an initiative to increase and enhance communication between VMware and its customers, users, and partners. Very briefly, my background is in product management, specifically in Internet services and enterprise software such as Oracle E-Business Suite. In a prior life, I was a management consultant.

I appreciate everyone's contributions to the forums, making our communities vibrant and an excellent source of expert information. I enjoy reading the lively debates and discussions. Unfortunately, while most members respect the rules of common decency and civility, even when in disagreement with others, a handful do not. When you respond to questions or comments with personal attacks, it lowers the level of discourse, hurts the feelings of others, and damages your own reputation. We are all guilty of losing our tempers, being critical, and being in a foul mood on occasion. Let's try as much as possible to keep hurtful putdowns in check and stick to professional demeanor.

Please review the COMMUNITY TERMS OF USE to which you agreed upon registration, especially section 4 (CONDUCT), clauses 4b and 4c. Remember that VMware reserves the right to warn and ban (last resort) repeat offenders from the communities, regardless of points status.

ACCEPTABLE: Your reasoning seems to be flawed; here's why I feel this way. You appear to misunderstand the functionality; allow me to clarify it for you. I disagree with that recommendation because of XYZ reasons.

UNACCEPTABLE: You're stupid/incompetent/lazy. You're not the sharpest tool in the shed, are you? Do you subscribe to the "Dumb and Dumberer" school of technology? *&^$#^%&*!!! (censored). Yo mama is so virtualized that...well, you get the point.

ROLE OF COMMUNITY MODERATORS:
I would also like to clarify that Moderators of the different forums (they have the icon next to their names), regardless of whether they are VMware staff or users themselves, have the authority to warn violators or escalate to my team, as the situation demands. Please respect their requests. They are your friends and mine. The Moderators spend countless hours keeping the forums free from spam and misplaced questions.

To find out more about the functions of Community Moderators, and to view a complete list of current Moderators, see VMware Community Moderators .

Thank you for your kind attention.

Badsah Mukherji
Sr. Community Manager
VMware Communities

VMware Communities Proposed Homepage Design

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:32:27 GMT

We're Listening

We've gotten feedback that the Communities (top-level) homepage and each individual community homepage are too cluttered, contain too much Web 2.0 gunk, and are hard to navigate and read. Good feedback.

We're setting out to fix it. And since we've also gotten feedback that we implemented the redesign with insufficient community input, I'm posting screenshots of the proposed new homepage design. Please take a look below and let us know what you think.

What We're Trying to Accomplish

Communities are places where all sorts of people meet up to discuss topics of relevance, interest, and importance to them. Technical communities involve a lot community-based support, but they also should be a place to discuss ideas, find news, share stories, and build a connection with peers. The VMware Communities redesign is about expanding the value in these other areas while preserving the tremendous self-service support value that has existed for some time. That's why we are adding features like blogs, documents, tags, and right-column content.

The new design we're proposing is meant to support this expansion of value, but also balance it with better navigation, better readability, and appropriate emphasis on the community content. We think we've made a big improvement, and most if not all of these changes are driven by your feedback. Now is an opportunity to tell us how close we are to the mark.

Process: We want to implement design improvements quickly, so please give feedback by November 9. We'll join the discussion too, decide on changes based on your feedback, communicate them, and then update the site.

And just to remind you, we also continue to work on VMware Communities Known Issues.

Proposed Changes

Site-Wide Changes

1. Move to a 2-column layout for better readability and less visual clutter
2. Remove some page elements that weren't critical
3. Put main content on the left so it displays in the visible part of a narrow browser window
4. Sub-communities and Actions are always at the top of the right column for better navigation

View the Communities Homepage (guest view)

1. Header
- a. Login | Register is moved to the right for consistency with username location in member view
- b. Advanced search link is added to the right of the search box

2. Main (Left) Column
- a. Announcement box is highlighted for better visibility
- b. All Communities title is bold for better visibility

3. Right Column
- a. The following items will be in the right column:
  - - Actions box: Guests are asked to log in when the click on any action
  - - Small promotion for relevant VMware content
  - - Technical Resources: Top technical resources of interest to communities participants
  - - VMware Blogs: Blog content of interest to communities participants
  - - Top Members: Formatted for consistency with other right column items
- b. Popular Tags and Latest Poll are dropped: These are more relevant on individual community pages

View the Communities Homepage (member view)

1. Header
- a. Same changes as communities homepage guest view plus:
- b. Edit My Communities link is available in the My Content dropdown with other per-user settings (not shown)

2. Main (Left) Column
- a. Same changes as communities homepage guest view plus:
- b. Tabs for My Communities and All Communities
  - - My Communities is the default
  - - All Communities loads only when clicked (to speed up page load time)
- c. Edit My Communities is on the My Communities tab for better visibility

3. Right Column
- a. Same changes as communities homepage guest view

View the Individual Community Homepage

1. Header
- a. Same changes as communities homepage member view

2. Main (Left) Column
- a. Announcement box is highlighted for better visibility

3. Right Column
- a. The following items will be in the right column:
  - - Sub-communities: Same as current site
  - - Actions box: Guests and logged-in members get the same actions; guests asked to log in
  - - Small promotion for relevant VMware content
  - - Popular Tags: This is context-sensitive for this community
  - - Community Resources: Context-sensitive for this community, e.g. on the Workstation community, Documentation links to the Workstation product documentation
  - - Top Members: Top members for this community
- b. Blogs and non-context-sensitive content are dropped

What Do You Think?

Let us know!

And thanks for your input. We look forward to improving the community experience.

The VMware Communities team

POLL: New forum or old forums?

thegabeman@gmail.com — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:36:49 GMT

I'm very interested to see how many people would like the old forums back. We have all read about the problems with the new forum and I personally am, like many, disappointed about what the new forum offers me compared to the old forum. Maybe we can do a poll about this..... so here it is:

Rules:

You may reply only once !
You will only reply with:

* KEEP OLD FORUM if you want the old forum back right now and don't have faith in a new update within the next 3 months
* TEMP OLD FORUM if you want the old forum back right now and expect VMware to first fix the problems in their testlab and come back with a better version soon
* NEW FORUM if you want the new forum to stay, because performance is good enough for you and you have faith that any issues will be resolved soon.

This is not a poll to start discussions about what does and doesn't work So only three options: "KEEP OLD FORUM" / "TEMP OLD FORUM" / "NEW FORUM"

Hope this can give us some insight about what people think of the new forum.

Gabrie

Letter to the VMware Community

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:47:16 GMT

On September 22nd, we upgraded the VMTN Forums application to a new Community platform. With this upgrade we wanted to enable new features that had been requested by the community including: wiki documents, integrated blogs, social networking capabilities and the ability to host sub-communities. We are very aware that this upgrade has not gone smoothly and many in the community have been disappointed by the disruption, as have we. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience it has caused.

We have heard you loud and clear, and appreciate all the feedback and testing that you have given us. We are acting on this feedback and have our resources and those of the platform vendor, Jive Software, focused on getting the communities back on track as soon as possible.

Although feedback from our early testing and communication was positive, we experienced a number of issues after the cutover that were not caught during testing. These primarily fall into two areas:

Performance: We are one of the largest communities in terms of amount of data and the density of our posts and the issues related to this were not picked up during load testing. We have deemed these issues to be the highest priority issues and the team identified and fixed most of the issues related to these performance problems within the first week. One issue that remains appears to be a memory leak on the JVM which continues to cause intermittent performance issues. This unfortunately caused an outage early Monday morning and we are working on ways to mitigate this situation while we continue to debug and fix the problem.
Usability: Some of these have been fixed already and will continue to be rolled out as soon as we can verify additional fixes and determine that the impact is positive.

We appreciate your continued help and support on the communities. We have debated whether to rollback or to push forward with the new platform and are constantly monitoring the community activity. Although we continue to see issues reported by some forum users, we are also seeing a high level of activity on the forums and that people have started to use and appreciate the new features.

We hope that by the end of the week we will have made enough progress to have proven that we will be able to stick with the plan and deliver added functionality and performance to enhance the value of the VMware Communities.

For a complete list of the tasks and activities, and the overall status of this effort please check out the status blog. Although we hope that these will be obvious and will continue to post our progress and will get more specific on issues, fixes and timelines.

Sindy Braun
Sr Director, Web Marketing and Communities

Forums help

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:41:32 GMT

Note: this needs a good bit of work.

Forums Help

General Help:

How do I login?
What do I do if I forgot my password?
Communities Settings
Search Help

VMware Communities:

What are the VMware Communities?
How is communities content organized?
Do I have to be registered to use the communities?
What are Threaded and Flat View modes?
How do I create a topic or post a reply?
How do I use the Private Message function?
What are notifications?
How can I format the text of my posts?
How do I check the spelling of my message?

VMTN Community Rewards Program:

What is the VMTN Discussion Forum Rewards Program?
How do I Earn Reward Points and Check My Reward Points Total?
How do I Ask a Question?
How do I Earn Points for Answering Questions?
How Many Points can Each Question be Worth?
How Do I Award Points to the Most Helpful Replies?
Can I Earn Reward Points for any Other Actions?
What are the Different Status Levels in the Rewards Program?
Will There be any Real Rewards Available?
Do VMware Employees Participate in the Forums?

General Help:

How do I Login?

To login to the communities, click the Login link in the upper-left corner of your browser window. You will be prompted to enter your VMware Store email address and password at this time. Logging into the VMware Store will automatically log you into the forums. (Note: You must have cookies enabled for this feature. Your login information will be encrypted and stored in a cookie.)
For help with signing up please see VMTN Discussion Forums Login Help. Please note that creating an account and participating in the forums constitutes your acceptance of the VMware Communities Terms of Use.

What do I do if I Forgot my Password?

If you cannot remember your password, there is a mechanism for password retrieval on the VMware Store login page. Click the Login link in the upper-right corner of your browser window, and then click on the Forgot your password link.

Communities Settings

After logging in to the VMware Communities, select Profile from the My Content menu to view and edit your communities preferences.

Profile displays an actions box on the left and seven tabs:

Actions box:

Edit profile - This allows you to update your profile in the VMware Communities. You can show or hide your name or email address, type in a biography, or edit your email address or real name.
Edit preferences - Allows editing of general viewing preferences such as threaded/flat view mode, default number of forum topics per page, preferred time zone and notification settings.
Change password - Allows you to change your password.*

Tabs:

Profile -
Overview -
Discussions -
Documents -
Blog Posts -
Email Notifications -
Private Messages -

Search Help

You can search the VMware Communities keyword in the upper right hand corner of the web site. If you need to do a more advanced search click the link without entering text in the search field or open the Advanced search page directly.

VMware Communities:

What Are the VMware Communities?

The VMTN Discussion Forums are an interactive message board for sharing knowledge and questions about VMware software and virtualization technologies. Get help, opinions, and feedback from other VMware users from around the globe by participating in the discussion forums. Prior to posting, please view our Terms of Use.

How is Forum Content Organized?

See the VMware Communities homepage.

Most Popular Forums

The main VMTN Discussion Forums page contains a dynamically updated list of the most popular discussion forums. The popularity of a forum is determined by the forum's age and how many recent posts or messages there have been.

Most Popular Discussions --

After navigating into any forum, the sidebar on the right shows the most popular discussions. The popularity of a discussion is determined by the age of the discussion and how many recent comments there have been. --

Filtering Content

A filter option is presented on each Topic page on the topic bar. You can use filters to only look at the following:

Answered Questions
Open Questions

Do I Have to be Registered to Use the Communities?

Anybody can view the content at the VMware Communities without logging in. If you are a member of any private forums, however, you will need to be logged in to view those private forums. You must create a forum user account if you want to create new messages, reply to messages, enable watches or participate in the rewards program. Prior to posting on the forums, it is always good to review the forum Terms of Use and Guidelines .

What are Flat and Threaded View modes?

There are two view modes available on the VMTN Discussion forums:

Flat View - Flat View shows the thread and all of it's replies, in chronological order.
Threaded View - Threaded View shows the thread and all of it's replies, and also indents the replies to show which message is being replied to. This makes it more simple to follow the progression of a long thread.

If you are logged in, you can change to any of these view modes by going to Forum Settings, then General Settings.

How do I Create a Topic or Post a Reply?

To start a new topic, first log in, then click into the appropriate forum and select Start a discussion. Type your question or comment in the subject line and type a message in the message box. Before you are about to post, you can spell check your message by clicking on the Spell Check button. Before posting you may also press the Preview button to see how it will look when it is posted. When you are satisfied with the content, press the Post Message button.

You can also choose to watch the topic (which will add it to your watch list, and allow you to receive email notifications when new posts are made) by clicking the Watch This Topic link after the message has been posted.

To post a reply to a topic, first log in, then open the message and select the Reply icon in the far right area of the message text. If you want to respond to specific text from the original message, click on Quote Original, and that will add the text from the original post in your message.

How do I Use the Private Message function?

For your convenience, a private message box has been configured for each registered forum user. This function is provided strictly to send private messages to other forum users. The Private Message box is accessed through Private Messages link in the My Content menu. Your private message store works much in the same way as an email box would, except for that you can ONLY send messages to other registered Communities members.

What are Notifications?

A notification notifies you if the topic you are interested in has been updated. Notifications on threads you are watching can be sent through email. You can also place a "watch" on a specific forum, and entire forum category, a specific user, a blog and a document. ~~When viewing a forum, any thread you are currently watching will have the Watch Binoculars icon next to it. Inactive watches expire automatically after 30 days.~~

To add a topic to your notifications list, click on the Receive email notifications link in the Action box on the left. Click on Stop email notifications to end the notifications.

To add an entire forum to your notifications list, click on the Receive email notifications link in the Action box on the left. Click on Stop email notifications to end the notifications.

To add an entire forum category to your notifications list, click on the Receive email notifications link in the Action box on the left. Click on Stop email notifications to end the notifications.

To add a user to your notifications list, click into the user's profile and click on Receive email notifications link in the Action box on the left. Click on Stop email notifications to end the notifications.

To add a document to your notifications list, click on Receive email notifications link in the Action box on the left. Click on Stop email notifications to end the notifications.

To add a blog to your notifications list, click on Receive email notifications link in the Action box on the left. Click on Stop email notifications to end the notifications.

To see the current list of all the notifications, select the Email Notifications in the My Content menu.

You can cancel a notification from this screen by clicking in the Delete check box then clicking the Delete button.

How Can I Format the Text of my Posts?

To format your message text, you can either use the Rich Text editor or insert Wiki Markups in the Plain Text Editor.

How do I Check the Spelling of my Message?

To check the text of your message for proper spelling, click the Spell Check icon prior to posting your thread or message.

If the spell check dictionary doesn't recognize a word in your message, it will appear in a box. You can correct it yourself by typing over what is displayed. If the dictionary has any suggestions, you will be able to see them in the suggestion box.

To choose one of the suggestions, simply select the suggestion you'd like to use and click on the Change button for each of the words you would like changed.

When you are finished checking your entire message, click on Post Message to save your changes and post the message with your spelling corrections. If you want to continue editing your message, hit Go Back or Edit to return to the message posting screen.

What is the VMTN Discussion Forum Rewards Program?

To encourage the community to use forums as a source of information and to help build valuable content, we employ a points program which rewards participation, and especially quality participation. In addition, we are introducing "status" icons, which will identify those forum members who have made a significant contribution to the VMware Community Discussion forums. This program is intended to spark more participation and interaction in a friendly but competitive way.

How do I Earn Reward Points and Check My Reward Points Total?

Reward points can be earned for several different types of forum activities. The system will automatically deposit reward points into your reward points pool based on your forum participation. We encourage all VMTN Discussion Forum users to provide high quality answers to other users in need. The more you participate, the more reward points you will earn. To check your reward points total, go to any thread where you have made a post and click on your username.

How do I Ask a Question?

When a user posts a new topic the Web form will present a check box asking the author of the topic if this is a question. The box must be checked in order to create a question in the forum. The question will be denoted by a question mark icon (). Upon posting this question the author will receive 1 point automatically deposited into their reward points pool.

How do I Earn Points for Answering Questions?

Forum members can post as many replies to a question as they wish. The original poster can then come back to the forum thread and award points for the most helpful answers to their question.

A Helpful Answer is worth 6 reward points and a Correct Answer is worth 10 reward points. Each question can only have one Correct Answer and up to two Helpful Answers. The poster who originally asked the question is the person who hands out the "Helpful Answer" and "Correct Answer" reward points.

Each time the original poster rates a reply they receive 1 point automatically deposited into their reward points pool. The original poster can therefore earn up to 3 more reward points for rating replies (1 Correct Answer and 2 Helpful Answers). The original poster is not eligible to receive Helpful Answer points or Correct Answer points for that thread. Responses that give Correct Answers are denoted by a star symbol. Helpful Answers are denoted by a light bulb symbol.

How Many Points can Each Question be Worth?

Any poster who asks a question can give up to 22 points for responses to the question. Here are some common examples, from the least amount of reward points handed out to the most:

Ex: Author gives no points
Ex: Author gives 1 post a Helpful Answer (worth 6 points)
Ex: Author gives 2 posts a Helpful Answer (worth 6 points each)
Ex: Author gives 1 Correct Answer (worth 10 points)
Ex: Author gives 1 Correct Answer (worth 10 points) and 1 Helpful Answer (worth 6 points)
Ex: Author gives 1 Correct Answer (worth 10 points) and 2 Helpful Answers (worth 6 points each)

How Do I Award Points to the Most Helpful Replies?

There are several ways to award helpful posters with reward points:

You may go to the topic and mark the most complete reply as a Correct Answer. This awards the writer of the reply with 10 points and denotes this reply with a .
You may go to the topic and mark a helpful reply as a Helpful Answer. This awards the writer of the reply with 6 points and denotes this reply with a . You may do this with up to TWO replies.
When you reply to a post to thank them for help, there is a button labeled: has your question been answered. Clicking this awards "Correct Answer" reward points to the poster you are replying to.
The moderator may also tag the question as an "assumed answered." Neither the moderator nor the repliers will get reward points for this action. We strongly encourage posters who ask questions to return to the forums and hand out reward points to the most helpful users.

After marking a message as "correct" your question will be automatically marked as answered.

Can I Earn Reward Points for Any Other Actions?

To encourage normal chatter in the forums, 1 point will be deposited into your reward points pool each time you post a new topic or compose a reply to a post.
~~Also, the forum moderator(s) can deposit reward points into any user's pool at any time, to acknowledge high quality posts from a particular user.~~

What are the Different Status Levels in the Rewards Program?

VMware will recognize users who are most active and helpful within the forum community. These users are highlighted on the main page of the VMTN Discussion Forums as well as within each posting by means of status icons. Users who reach a pre-defined score in the community will be identified as leaders in the VMTN Discussion Forums.

Brand new users to the forums will be referred to as "lurkers", until such time as they have earned at least 6 reward points. The following tiers of forum status are available beyond "Lurker":
Novice : 6-50 pts
Enthusiast : 51-250 pts
Hot Shot : 251-750 pts
Expert : 751-2000 pts
Master : 2001-5000 pts
Virtuoso : 5000+ pts
Champion : 10000+ pts
Guru : 20000+ pts

Will There be any Real Rewards Available?

Forum users who reach the "enthusiast" level (50 reward points or more) will receive an exclusive VMTN Discussion Forums shirt! Other special prizes may be available for the very best of our forum users. Prizes will be handed out once quarterly. Stay tuned to the forums for more details!

Do VMware Employees Participate in the Forums?

VMware employees are encouraged to participate in forum discussions and live by the same community rules as all other forum members. They will have an additional icon (the VMware logo) next to their name to identify them as a VMware employee. VMware employees can receive reward points exactly like other users, but cannot collect any prizes with their reward points earnings.

Community Moderators

An up-to-date list of Community Moderators and their functions may be found within VMware Community Moderators.

If you have a question or comment about forum moderation, or need to get in touch with a moderator right away, please contact one of the
above via forum PRIVATE MESSAGE. You can usually find at least one of them logged in.

User Moderators on the VMTN Forums

The VMTN Forums has user moderators for several reasons, also listed in detail within VMware Community Moderators :
1) To keep postings and forums organized and clean.
2) To take user comments about the system and make sure the critical requests are being looked at
3) To help facilitate in technical discussions, and keep FAQ information in the product forums up to date.

~~*How User Moderators* *are Chosen*~~

~~Forum users must meet ALL of the following qualifications (no exceptions) in order to become aUser Moderator on the VMTN Forums:~~
~~1) At least six months as a registered VMTN Discussion Forum user.~~
2) "Expert" status level or higher (751+ reward points). 3) On the "top ten leaderboard" forum-wide, or "top three" in one of the product related technical forums. 4) Willingness to adhere to the terms in the User Moderator Agreement.
~~5) An established track record as a concerned community member.~~
~~6) User Moderator Candidates must be approved. A simpuser moderators. Forum main administrator serves as tiebreaker in case of a tie, but otherwise will not vote.~~

If you would like to be a Moderator...

Send a private message via this forum interface, to user RDellimmagine.
PLEASE verify first that you fit into all of the qualifications above.
Robert will verify your qualifications and let you into the applicants area for consideration.

Community Moderator Requirements:

1) At least six months as a registered VMTN Discussion Forum user.
2) "Master" status level or higher (2000+ reward points).
3) Willingness to adhere to the terms in the User Moderator Agreement.
4) An established track record as a concerned community member.
5) Nominated by existing user moderators or self-nominated.
6) Approved by existing user moderators and the VMware Communities team.

VMware Communities Known Issues

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:39:48 GMT

These are the known issues with the VMware Communities software. We will attempt to address all of these issues or provide workarounds as soon as possible. Follow the VMware Communities Blog for updates. Please report any additional bugs found in the Communities Website Feedback community.

We believe performance issues have been resolved, although we still see periodic slowdowns that require us to reboot the system. If you are experiencing problems, please report them to vmtn_team@vmware.com or in this thread.

Frequently Seen Problems

Periodic site slowdowns and restarts. This is the top-priority open issue.

Nov 4: See latest performance update at Re: Performance?.

Internet Explorer is slow. Because of the way Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 handles Javascript, performance is slower in IE6 than in other browsers. You may experience browser slowdowns using the menus and clicking on links. For faster performance, visitors should use IE7 or Firefox. There are some additional IE6 display issues.

Oct 9: Fixed. JavaScript-based menus were replaced with CSS-based ones. You may be required to clear your cache. See Monitoring and IE Performance. If you still experience problems with IE, see Request for Comments: IE6 and IE7 javascript errors?.

Email notification is ON by default. You will receive email notifications on all your postings, and all replies to your postings. To turn this off and return to the old behavior that was in VMTN Forums, go to "My Content > Preferences" in the menu bar above and turn off email notification.

Email reply functionality can take a long time. Although the new reply-via-email feature works, occasionally a reply will take hours to show back up in the thread.

Oct 24: Assumed fixed. We have not seen this recently, although we did not apply a specific fix other than performance tuning. Please report in Communities Website Feedback if you see this problem.

Posts per page setting can't be saved.

Oct 24: Fixed. You can set a preference of 15, 30, or 50 in My Content -> Preferences. More details at Feature Fix Released.

Use the Discussion tab for unread messages and last post

Oct 4: Fixed. The Discussion Tab, in which unread threads are marked as bold, is now the default view of each community.

View all posts from a user.

Oct 24: Fixed. Member profile now shows all messages posted by the member, not just threads started by the member. More details at Feature Fix Released.

Look and Feel

Threaded view. The current software does not have a threaded view.

Oct 24: Fixed. You can set a preference of threaded or flat in My Content -> Preferences. More details at Feature Fix Released.

Status icons missing from threads.

Oct 4: Fixed. Status icons are once again shown inside threads.

Text sometimes does not wrap with the screen. In reply screens and on the Browse Documents and Browse Discussion screens, text sometimes runs off the right edge of the screen and does not wrap. Refreshing often fixes the problem.

Oct 19: Several fixes made in different builds, and all known cases are resolved.

View communities with unread threads. Although you can see unread threads in a community in the Discussion tab, you can't see a list of all communities where those with unread threads are indicated.

Visible indication of watches. In the old VMTN Forums software, threads that were watched were indicated with an icon in the thread list. In the new software, there is no such indication on that screen. If a thread is being watched, in the Actions box there will be an item "Stop email notifications." All your watches can be seen under the menu item My Content > Email notifications.

Layout is hard to read. The fonts and colors in the Community (Discussion list) view have low contrast, and some people have commented that the layout feels cramped with the right sidebar not leaving much room for content. We will attempt to address these concerns.

Oct 24: Partial fix -- u/i changes were made to make list of discussions and messages easier to scan. We intend to make additional fixes in this area.

Right sidebar is static, not dynamic. The right sidebar was designed to contain dynamically-updated content (news feeds) and content specialized to each community (Workstation content in the Workstation community, etc.) While we are testing usability and performance improvements, we have turned off dynamic and contextual content on the right sidebar, and used the same static sidebar throughout the site.

Private messages

No notification for private messages. When you have a new message, your My Content menu should turn orange to let you know.

Oct 9: Fixed.

Email notification of private messages. If your email address is marked public, you will receive a notification when you have private messages. If your email is marked private, you will not. There is no way of changing this behavior otherwise.

Editor

Editor too small. The plain text editor is about 30 characters wide and not resizable. Rich text editor and preview pane are the correct size. The blog comment editor is also too small.

Oct 9: Fixed. It is now full width.

Editor fails to load. If the editor fails to load, please refresh the page.

Oct 19: We made a fix to the editor that we believe fixes the problem, except possibly when the site is running slowly. More details at Request for Comments: Rich Text Editor loading and IE.

code, pre, and url markup does not format properly. For threads that contained code, pre, and url markup before the migration to the new VMware Communities, that markup does not format correctly in VMware Communities. Users should ignore the links that are inserted. Document or discussions owners may edit their documents/discussions and update the markup for code segments and URLs. View the wiki markup help (also available by clicking the question mark help icon in the plain text editor) to see the full list of wiki markup conventions you can use.

Oct 10: Fixed. Code and URL tags now work correctly.

Editor adds/removes line breaks from my post. The editor sometimes does not format a post correctly while saving it. Use the preview tab of the editor to make sure the post will render correctly before submitting it. The plain text tab of the editor can sometimes be more convenient if you are comfortable with wiki markup.

Pasting uses pop-up window. If you use either button on the toolbar -- the plain text paste, or the rich text paste -- or if you use the Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut, you must paste within a pop-up dialog box. Your pop-up blocker should be set to allow pop-ups on communities.vmware.com. A workaround is to right-click in the editor and use the Paste function, which does not require a pop-up dialog.

Saving a document where you are not the original author can give a system error. Please let us know if you encounter this error.

Search

Advanced search. There is no direct link to the Advanced Search page and select "More Options".

Search in this community. To search in an individual community, do an empty search or go to the Advanced Search page and select "More Options".

Oct 24: Fixed. More details at Feature Fix Released.

No user filter. There is no way to limit searches to a particular user.

Searches default to AND, not OR The documentation states that "Intel AMD" will be interpreted as "Intel OR AMD". We have changed the default behavior to AND.

Search returns individual messages, not threads. In the old VMTN Forums behavior, search would return one result per thread. Now it will return a result for each message matching the search term.

OR searches not working. Using boolean OR in searches is not working at this time, but the || operator (two pipes) works correctly.

Quoted search phrases not working. Using quotes in your search (e.g., "ESX Server") are not working at this time.

Migration and Account issues

Email addresses can't be edited. To change your email address, please send a private message to JohnTroyer.

500 Server Error on Logout. If you see this error when you try to logout, delete all of your VMware cookies and log out again.

Oct 24: Assumed fixed. We have not seen this recently. Please report in Replay-Based Debugging if you see this problem.

Dates of private messages and polls are incorrect. The dates of private messages and polls were all set to the date of the migration.

Oct 24: Won't fix. Minor issue that becomes more minor over time.

Indication of new or updated content did not migrate. New discussions and documents since your last visit have bold titles and updated discussions and documents since your last visit have bold titles with the word "(updated)" appended to them. This feature is available only for new discussions and documents created since the migration.

Oct 24: Won't fix. Minor issue that becomes more minor over time.

The name field in your User Profile may not have migrated from your VMTN profile. If your name did not migrate in your user profile, please click My Content > Profile and then click Edit My Profile in the Actions box and enter your name.

Oct 24: Won't fix. Minor issue that becomes more minor over time.

User Profiles for users with usernames containing high-bit characters like é do not display The user profiles for these users are not available. In some cases, users may manually enter the URL in the form of http://communities.vmware.com/people/<username here>.

Again, we are sorry for the inconvenience and we thank you for your patience. This transition will allow you to more easily find and share information and collaborate with others. Please report any additional bugs found in the Communities Website Feedback community.