Data Access Worldwide has moved our highly successful on-line, peer-to-peer support mechanism to Web Forums using vBulletin®. This move also involved the migration of the valuable, current Newsgroup content to the new forums.

Visit the new Web Forums at http://Support.DataAccess.com/Forums.

Why the move to Web Forums?

The distinct capabilities of Web Forums enable us to improve our level of service to our worldwide developer community. If you have used our newsgroups in the past, you’ll be most likely to notice the following enhancements in the new forums:

• Access from anywhere via web browser
• User Profiles
• User Stats
• Polling
• Events Calendar
• Advanced search capabilities
• All messages visible all the time (no messages will be hidden because of news client configurations)
• No message downloading necessary (as needed in news clients)
• Thread subscription (when someone posts to a thread you subscribed to, you may receive notification via email)
• No news reader client software required
• Much friendlier for prospective and new developers
• The forums’ content is searchable – increases exposure of the products and the company

Why vBulletin?

There are many web forum options, both commercial and open source, that we could have chosen to host the new Data Access Forums, so why did we choose vBulletin?

A large part of the value of the interaction in the Newsgroups comes from the wealth of knowledge contained in the thousands of existing conversations. In addition to providing all of the important features above, we felt that the ability to bring that valuable content, as intact as possible, over into the new forums is very important and vBulletin gave us the best path to do just that. Click to see current users’ testimonials about vBulletin.

Please note that the Newsgroups will be kept in read-only mode until December 31st, 2009, at which time they will be taken permanently off-line. WASP will remain active on the Newsgroups as long as they are on-line.

Transition FAQ’s

• What happens to WASP?
• What happened if I did NOT register before the February 26th deadline?
• Will Data Access Worldwide be using all of the capabilities of vBulletin?
• Where can I find out how the new Web Forums work?

What happens to WASP?

The new, built-in search capabilities of the Data Access Worldwide web forums make WASP redundant, so it will no longer be necessary. The move from Newsgroups to the new web forum was disclosed to Sture Andersen when we first initiated the internal research project. We join the entire Visual DataFlex community in expressing our sincere thanks to Sture for creating and hosting WASP over the years.

"Having written and hosted WASP has been great fun for us over the years. However, we are now looking forward to a time when WASP isn't needed anymore and when more users can have easier access to the support forums. The WASP search engine at www.sture.dk/wasp will remain on-line at least until the end of 2009."

- Sture Andersen of Sture ApS

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What happened if I did NOT register before the February 26th deadline?

The benefit of registering before the import of the Newsgroup data is that all existing messages that match your e-mail address would have been automatically “attached” to your member profile. Once the the import was done, messages that didn't match any existing e-mail address were imported and the threads kept intact, but they were not attached to any member profiles and unfortunately can’t be attached in the future.

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Not initially. vBulletin can play host to a wide range of “community” features. We have started by using the core features that allow us to provide a seamless transition from the old newsgroups to the new Web Forums. As we progress, some capabilities and options may be added or further adjusted in the future, and some may never be turned on.

Our decisions on how to manage the capabilities of the new forum will be based on the best balance of company and product goals and serving the developer community. As in all things, your constructive input is always sought and appreciated. We will continue to seek your input and ideas about how to best achieve these goals.

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Where can I find out how the new forum works?

You can learn more about General Forum Usage, User Profile Features and Reading and Posting Messages in the Board FAQ at http://support.dataaccess.com/forums/faq.php. The FAQ is accessible even if you aren’t ready to register.

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