To post, you must register with your full, real name (both first and last names). No handles, nicknames, or abbreviations are allowed. Disposable email addresses may not be used, because a valid email address is needed to change your password or profile information in the future.

Cross-Posting and Multi-Posting are not allowed. These are defined as posting the same (or similar) messages multiple times. This is particularly true when the posts are short expressions of mockery which contain no information of value.

Profanity, mockery, derision, and rude or disparaging remarks (about PowerBASIC or others) are strictly prohibited. Advertising or promotion is allowed only for products designed to work with and enhance PowerBASIC compilers. Do not post credit card numbers or product serial numbers.

This forum has been created for "Peer-to-Peer" questions and discussions. While PowerBASIC employees may contribute, this forum is not a source of official support.

The administrators of the PowerBASIC Peer Support Forums will strive to remove objectionable material, but it may not be possible to eliminate it entirely. Posted messages express the views of the author, not necessarily those of PowerBASIC, Inc. or its employees.

By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will post no messages which are disparaging, obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, profane, hateful, threatening, or which violate any law.

The owners of PowerBASIC Peer Support Forums reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason. This Message Board is owned and operated by PowerBASIC, Inc. All messages are the property of PowerBASIC, Inc. and copyright (c) 1999-2011 PowerBASIC, Inc. These rights are protected by United States copyright law and international treaties.

Registration to this forum is free, but you must abide by these rules and policies. If these rules are violated, access to all forum information may be restricted or revoked.

There is a lot of useful information in the PowerBASIC Peer Support Forums. In fact, just about every question you have has probably already been asked and answered somewhere in the forums.

To search the forums, click on the "search" link at the top of most pages. You can have the option to use the Advanced Search (click the Advanced Search link) or the default quick search. The Advanced Search allows you to narrow your searches to search only titles or the entire post, search for posts between certain dates, or to search in one or more forums.

Another useful search option is to show results as posts instead of threads. This option is available for both the Quick Search and the Advanced Search options. It can have two big advantages: 1) it enables you to jump to a specific post in a long thread 2) a short snippet of text from the post is displayed, which can help you decide whether you want to read the post without clicking on it.

A Boolean search is an advanced keyword search method used to narrow your search results. When searching through information on a programming board such as the PowerBASIC Peer Support Forums, it can be invaluable in maximizing your search results

You can use boolean search operators to more effectively search the PowerBASIC Peer support forums. Here is a detailed look at Boolean search operators.

• +
  A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each post that is returned.
• -
  A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the posts that are returned.
• > <
  These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a post. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.
• ( )
  Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
• ~
  A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the post's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A post containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.
• *
  The asterisk serves as the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected.
• ""
  A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (‘"’) characters matches only posts that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.

Examples of searching using boolean operators:

• dialog show
  Find posts that contain at least one of the two words.
• +dialog +show
  Find posts that contain both words.
• +dialog show
  Find posts that contain the word “dialog”, but rank posts higher if they also contain “show”.
• +dialog -show
  Find posts that contain the word “dialog” but not “show”.
• +dialog +(>pixels <units)
  Find posts that contain the words “dialog” and “pixels”, or “dialog” and “units” (in any order), but rank “dialog pixels” higher than “dialog units”.
• image*
  Find posts that contain words such as “image”, “images”, “imagex”, or “imagelist”.
• "dialog show"
  Find posts that contain the exact phrase “dialog show” (for example, posts that contain “dialog show modal” but not “dialog is showing”).

You can now search based on tags added to a particular thread. When adding a new thread or even reading an old thread posted by someone else you can add tags to the thread that can be used to in a tag search.

At the bottom of each thread there is a "Edit Tags" link. Click this link and add as many tags that you are feel are necessary. For example if the thread is talking about accessing Excel via COM, add the tags COM and Excel. You can add tag words from 2 to 32 characters in length, this should help with searching for two letter words such as "vb".

There are two ways to search by tags. When you click the Search menu item from the navigational bar, there is now an additional option titled "Tag Search". A Tag Search will display all the most commonly used tags in the forums or you can type in a tag to search by. Another way to search by tags is at the bottom of each thread, there is a list of the tags associated with this thread, you can click on any of the tags in this list and it will display all the threads associated with that tag.

Tags are added by you, the community, the tag search can only be as good you want it to be. I am sure in time that this will be a great addition to the forums.

• Forums, Threads and Posts
• Registration
• Searching Forums and Threads
• Announcements
• Thread Display Options
• Viewing New Posts or Today's Posts
• Rating Threads
• Thread Tools
• Tags
• Cookies
• Lost Passwords
• Calendars
• Members List
• Your Notifications
• Quick Links
• Contacting other Members
• Dealing with Troublesome Users
• RSS and Podcasting

• My Public Profile
• The User Control Panel
• Changing User Details
• Signatures, Avatars and Profile Pictures
• Other Settings and Options
• Profile Page Customization
• Social Groups
• Friends and Contacts
• Albums and Pictures
• Private Messages
• Subscriptions
• Reputation

• Posting New Messages
• Replying to a Post
• Editing and Deleting your Posts
• Creating and Participating in Polls
• Attachments and Images
• Smilies
• Message Icons and Thread Prefixes
• Moderators and Administrators