The following explains the forum interface and provides some tips and tricks for posting content. You can also keep up with keep up with news from the forums on the Key Happenings blog.
Discussion forums allow you to share ideas, opinions and information quickly and easily. Organized by threads in an easy-to-follow format, discussion forums are designed so you can quickly locate information, find other knowledgeable users and participate in conversations.
These forums are designed as peer-to-peer exchanges. SAS employees do watch the forums and occasionally participate in the discussions. However, you should not use the forums in place of SAS Technical Support. If you are having issues with your software, contact Tech Support.
The content in the forums is structured as follows:
You can read most of the content in the SAS discussion forums without logging in to support.sas.com. You may be invited to participate in a restricted or private forum. These forums are not available to the general public and do require that you login to read or to post.
We require you to login and to create a forum ID if you want to post questions or responses. The forum ID give you the opportunity to mask your e-mail address. We ask all SAS employees to create a forum ID that contains @sas. You can create any ID that you want. Note that login is also required to set watches or customize the way you view the forums.
The discussion forums use the same login and profile that is used by the rest of sas.com (both support.sas.com and www.sas.com). If you have logged in anywhere on either of these sites recently, you may still be logged in when you visit the forum. If not, select the Login link in the upper right corner of any forums page. If you have never logged into a sas.com Web site, you will be required to complete a profile before logging in. Remember that you will also be required to create a forum ID before you post.
Sometimes we forget our passwords. If this happens to you, select the Login link, the select the Forgot password? link in the Log in page. We will send you a new password. This password is long and contains numbers that you can't remember. So, when you get the new password, login and reset your password by typing a new one into the Password field on the Profile page.
To start a new thread, choose the appropriate forum and select Post New Thread. Type your thread header 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 Spell Check. You can also choose to watch the thread by clicking the Watch This Thread box.
When you are satisfied with your message, you can preview your message to see how it will appear when posted by clicking on Preview. To post, select Post Message.
To post a reply to a thread, select the reply icon next to the message you would like to reply to. If you want to respond to specific text from the original message, select Quote Original, which will add the text from the original post in your message.
To format your message text, there are three buttons for Bold (B), Italics (I) and Underline (U). Clicking on these buttons will add tags to the message field. For example, typing: "This is [b]bold[/b] text, and this is [i]italicized[/i] text" will appear as "This is bold text, and this is italicized text" once you post the message.
The most common question is "how do I format my code?" Use the same type of tag as with bold and italics; enclose the code in [pre] and [/pre]. Note that if your lines are really long it may cause display errors.
Get more formatting tips from this forum post.
To check the text of your message for proper spelling, select Spell Check on the post screen.
You must be logged in to create or update your profile. Once you are logged in, select Your Control Panel. You can set your profile and forums preferences and create watch settings from here. To edit these settings, fill in your updated information, then select Save.
From the main page of the discussion forums, type your term(s) into the search box, select which forum(s) you want to search, and click the Go icon.
When you are in a Forum page, you can click on Search Forum to use an advanced search page where you can narrow your search by specifying a date range or filtering by username.
You can find more information about searching SAS forums on the Key Happenings on support.sas.com blog.
A watch notifies you by -email if the thread you are interested in has been updated.
To add a thread to your watch list, click on the Watch This Thread link at the top of the thread page. Click on Stop Watching Thread to end the e-mail notifications. After 30 days, inactive watches automatically expire. You can also watch forums, categories and users. For example, when a new message is posted in a forum you're watching then you'll be notified by e-mail.
To see the current list of watches, click on Your Control Panel then Watches. From this screen you can choose to receive e-mail notifications when new posts are made. Just click on Add Email Notification next to the thread for which you want to be notified.
You can delete a watch by clicking in the Delete tick box for the watch you want to delete, then clicking the Delete button.
More information about watching forums is available in the Key Happenings on support.sas.com blog. Note that you can also use the RSS feed options to keep up with additions to the forums.