The
signature appears at the bottom of each post. For example, you typed in
Jerry Thomas above as your signature. If you entered this in your Profile, it would automatically be added to the bottom each post you make... If you click the Show Signature: check box at the bottom of the text entry box when creating or editing your post.
You can also
Edit a current or prior post you made by clicking the
edit/delete button below the post. This opens up the text entry window for the post immediately above. Forum members can edit only their posts. Admin and Moderators can edit any posts. Visitors (not registered) can only view, not post or edit. By editing, you can correct mistakes, add new text after you have discovered something new about your prior post. When you edit a post, the Forum program will add a message something like
Edited by (your forum username) on (current date/time). You can also delete a post in the same text entry window. You can only edit or delete your own posts. Admin can delete any posts or entire Threads, or move Threads to another Forum.
Emoticons are explained if you scroll to the bottom of a Forum page and click the
Smiles link. I duplicated below what to enter for each emoticon.
:c =
(cool)
:e =
(eek as in what a surprise!)
:? =
(confused)
:r =
(roll eyes as in "Oh yeah, how stupid of me")
:) =
(smiley face)
:g =
(grins for all)
:s =
(so embarrised)
:f =
(frown for when MTU goofed)
:t =
(tongue stuck out)
:m =
(mad for when you are really upset which is equivalent to yelling at us.
)
:w =
(to leave on a friendly note
)
Click the
disable smilies check box at the bottom of the text entry window when you do not want the smilie character sequence (such as
:)) to convert to a smilie face
.
You can use these formatting strings in your posts:
BOLD -
[b
] followed by your text to bold and
[/b
] to end the bolding.
ITALICS -
[i
] your text to be italicized followed by
[/i
]
[font color=red]RED COLORING[/font] -
[font color=red
] [font color=red]your text to make red[/font] followed by
[/font
]
[font color=red]RED COLORING[/font] -
[b
][font color=red
] [font color=red]your text to make red in bold[/font] followed by
[/b
][/font
]
As to customer support, for 31 years at MTU and my prior company TUI, we have never charged for support. Most companies do not allow you to talk to a human being without an annual contract or a credit card number. However, when folks call and ask consulting questions about thir computer that is not related to our products at all, it is frustrating. For example, if you bought Microstudio (a $50 product) and call to ask how to make your CD Burner work when you bought it from some other vendor, or calling to get us to teach you how to use Windows or the mouse, is abusing us.
We work very hard to polish the
human interface on our products. That is one of the distinguishing features of MTU. We design for the intended user. For example, Goldenhawk has an excellent product. It can duplicate a CDG disc just like Microstudio. However, we don't force you to have to know how many bytes/sector is required for a CDG disc. We bury the technology, and deliver you the function without your even thinking about it. I have been "beating up" my programmers for 31 years to make them do what the client wants, not to code the way that is easiest for them. I pay them for the extra time to polish the code for the user.
I almost did not add the ability to handle Audio CDs because it forced our client to make a decision, creating a
Karaoke CDG versus
Audio CD. Sounds simple, but a decision must be made, which can confuse some folks. We spend many, many hours coding and tweeking the error messages, instruction messages and text in dialog boxes. If I and our users don't like the way a feature works, I work with Engineering to make trade-offs so it works the "right way".
In Microstudio 2.303, we spent a long time adding in new error checking coding. When even one client reports a problem that indicates a bug or flaw in our code, everyone at MTU is upset about it. If it is bad enough, we start immediately and fix it. Just as you have, many of our clients praise how easy it is to use our products.
Because of the problems reported in Microstuido 2.303, in less than a week we have already written 2.304. I just received the testible version this morning and am preparing it to go out to our beta testers. You can find the changes on our site (page link to be added shortly in this post
).