Forum FAQ

This article contains some FAQs explaining how this site's forum works.

Can you change my login/ username?

Yes, click on "Private Messaging" and send a message to the site's administrator indicating your preferred new username. However, please do a search to ensure the name is not already taken by clicking on the "Members" link.

How do I post messages?

Only registered users can post messages. Login, navigate to a forum, and click on the "New Topic" button at the top right hand side of the screen.

Please note that you may not see this button until your browser downloaded all the images.

Why can't I edit my own messages?

Users can edit their own messages until someone replied to them. This is done to ensure people don't change a question after an answer is provided.

'Invalid confirmation key' error. What's wrong?

Users may get 'Invalid confirmation key' errors when trying to activate their forum accounts. Possible solutions:

• Check your e-mail to ensure you have entered the URL correctly.
• The activation link is only valid for one click. Some operating systems may activate the links twice when it is clicked. If this happens, you will get this error but the account should be activated regardless.

'Your session has expired' error. What's wrong?

This may happen occasionally when your browser's cookies expired. Nothing to be worried about. Just resubmit the form.

Also see issue reported at http://www.orafaq.com/forum/m/200864/0/

Can you please unsubscribe me?

This site does not send out unsolisticated e-mails. You will only receive messages from us if you managed to subscribe to them. If so, please unsubscribe yourself by navigating to the "Control Panel->Subscriptions".

I'm a junior member. When will I be a member?

Newly registered users will have a junior member status. After posting 50 message they will be members, and after 100 messages they will be senior members.

Users who posted more than 1000 messages will be considered as moderators.

Why is it not acceptable to use IM-speak?

IM-speak (or Instant Messenger language) is generally not appreciated as it is unprofessional and hard to read. So, please avoid abbreviations like: "U", "Ur", "U r", "Plz", "prb", "qry", etc. This is a professional forum and people will judge your professionalism by the way to communicate. If you don't take time to write proper English, you cannot expect others to provide proper answers.

Forum search doesn't return the expected results

Use the site search engine instead of the forum's search engine. The site search engine is more powerful, but results are delayed by a week. Some examples.

Differences between the forum and site search engines:

Forum: Index forum posts on the fly (can search posts immediately) Simplified search logic to keep resource utilization to a minimum Custom made for searching forum messages Cannot handle that many documents

Site search: Can handle a huge volume of documents Supports more complicates searches Index documents once a week (too resource intensive to index on week days).

Quick links to wiki pages

Users can create quick links to Wiki pages by including link words in double square brackets in their forum posts. For example:

"See [[Metalink]]." will be rendered as "See Metalink.".

Users can also specify alternate text for links, For example:

"[[Oracle 11g|11g release 1]]" will be shown as 11g release 1.

For more details, read this forum thread.

How do I create an avatar for my account?

Use a site like http://mypictr.com/ to create your avatar from a photo of yourself. Select a pixel size of 64x64 - the forum will not accept larger avatars!

When done, save the avatar image to your PC and upload it to the forum (Control Panel -> Account Settings -> Custom Avatar File:).

What does OP stand for?

On Internet newsgroups and message boards OP normally refers to the Original Poster - the person who started the thread.