Discussion Forums Come and talk with us!

We want you to be involved!  Customer Involvement is one of our core goals - read About Us and Our Philosophy for a summary of our goals.  By being involved in the testing and development of our products, you will ultimately benefit from a product that more closely matches your needs, and you will receive a product that is of higher quality.
 

This is where you can talk with us about anything to do with our products.

• Are you having trouble using one of our products?  Ask us!
• Have you found a problem in one of our products, but would like to talk it over before submitting a bug report?  Talk to us!
• Is there something that irritates you about one of our products?  Tell us!

Our discussion forums are open to everyone.  Any message that you post will be visible to everyone.  The chances are that you are not the only one with a problem, so other people will benefit from your message as well.

To access our forums you will need to use a separate program called a "News Reader".  (For those technically minded, this is because the forums are hosted using NNTP). 

Most people will already have a News Reader installed, but will probably not even realise it!  That is because one is installed by default with most version of Microsoft Windows, and it is called "Outlook Express".  You may even be using Outlook Express for your emails.  While most people use Outlook Express for emails, it can also be used as a News Reader to connect to NNTP Discussion Forums such as this one.  Note that on Windows Vista, Outlook Express has been replaced by "Windows Mail" - but it will do NNTP Discussion Forums (newsgroups) as well.

Hint: the terms "discussion forum", "forum" and "newsgroup" are interchangeable.  You will find that the software you will use to view our discussion forums will most likely use the terminology of "newsgroup".

So assuming that you have a News Reader installed, you should be able to click on the link at the bottom of this page and your News Reader should automatically start up and prompt you to add the new Newsgroup Server.  Simply follow the prompts as appropriate.  You can enter anything you like for the User Name and Email Address fields - it is highly recommended that you include a fake email address to avoid receiving spam email. 

Please note that our server requires an email address that is formatted in a valid address - i.e. it must have an "@" sign in it.  You are quite welcome to use "invalid@psoft.com.au" as your email address.
 

How our Discussion Forums are structured

Once you have signed up, you should be presented with a list of newsgroups, for example:

• petrie-software.public.baslogue.installation
• petrie-software.public.test
  

You will need to "subscribe" to the newsgroups that you want to read or post messages to.  This is no harm in subscribing to them all.

There is a hierarchy to the naming of our newsgroups.  All publicly accessible newsgroups begin with "petrie-software.public".  Next comes the product name - e.g. "baslogue".  This is followed by a subgrouping within the product.  The example above is a forum to be used for any issues encountered while installing the Baslogue™ product, hence "installation".  Post a message in the newsgroup that you feel is most appropriate for your message.

There is a special newsgroup called "petrie-software.public.test".  You can post messages to this newsgroup to make sure that you have set up your News Reader correctly - i.e. as a test.  By doing this you can:

• make sure that you can actually post to our newsgroups
• make sure that your name appears as you want it to appear on the message that you post

• Be mindful that you are posting to a public forum, where everybody else can read what you say.
• Pay careful attention to what you write in the "subject" line - this is what other people will see first as they browse through the newsgroup, so your subject line should accurately reflect the content of your message.
  
• Please be courteous.  If your message contains offensive language, it may be removed at our discretion.
• Please do not post your message to more than one newsgroup.  Post it to the group that you feel is most appropriate.
  
• Feel free to respond to a message that someone else has posted.
  
• You may not always receive a response directly from us.  If we feel that somebody else's response has adequately addressed the issue in your message, then we will leave it that.
• You can easily recognise a response that comes from us because the name of the person responding will have "psoft" in brackets after it - e.g. "John Smith (psoft)"

 
Discussion Forums - Address