If you are a licensed RegexMagic user, you have instant access to the RegexMagic online forums. Obviously, your computer will need to be connected to the Internet.
In the layouts, you can access the Forum panel by clicking on the Forum tab. In the default layout, you can find that tab near the top of the RegexMagic window. In the dual monitor layout, the Forum tab is on the floating panel on the second monitor.
Press Alt+9 on the keyboard to move keyboard focus to the Forum panel, and to make it visible if it was hidden. Or, select the Forum item in the View menu. You can access that menu by the View button on the Assistant panel, and by right-clicking on the caption or tab of any panel in RegexMagic.
When you click the Login button you will be asked for a name and email address. The name you enter is what others will see when you post a message to the forum. It is polite to enter your real, full name. The forums are private, friendly and spam-free, so there’s no need to hide behind a pseudonym. While you can use an anonymous handle, you’ll find that people (other RegexMagic users) are more willing to help you if you let them know who you are. Support staff from Just Great Software will answer technical support questions anyhow.
The email address you enter is used to email you whenever others participate in one of your discussions. The email address is never displayed to anyone, and will never be used for anything other than the automatic notifications. RegexMagic’s forum system does not have a function to respond privately to a message. If you don’t want to receive automatic email notifications, there’s no need to enter an email address.
If you select “never email replies”, you’ll never get any email. If you select “email replies to conversations you start”, you’ll get an email whenever somebody replies to a conversation that you started. If you select “email replies to conversations that you participate in”, you’ll get an email whenever somebody replies to a conversation that you started or replied to. The From address on the email notifications will be forums@jgsoft.com. You can filter the messages based on this address in your email software.
RegexMagic’s forum system uses the standard HTTP protocol which is also used for regular web browsing. If your computer is behind an HTTP proxy, click the Proxy button to configure the proxy connection.
If you prefer to be notified of new messages via an RSS feed instead of email, log in first. After RegexMagic has connected to the forums, you can click the Feeds button to select RSS feeds that you can add to your favorite feed reader.
Below the Login button, there’s a drop-down list where you can select which particular forum you want to participate in. The “Just Great Software news” forum is read-only. Announcements about new RegexMagic releases and other Just Great Software products will appear there.
The “RegexMagic discussion” forum is for discussing anything related to the RegexMagic software itself. This is the place for technical support questions, feature requests and other feedback regarding the functionality and use of RegexMagic.
The “regular expressions” forum is for discussing regular expressions in general. Here you can talk about creating regular expressions for particular tasks, and exchange ideas on how to implement regular expressions with whatever application or programming language you work with.
Before starting a new conversation, please check first if there’s already a conversation going on about your topic. In the top right corner of the Forum panel, there is a box on the toolbar that you can use to search for messages. When you type something into that box, only conversations that include at least one message containing the word or phrase you typed in will be shown. The filtering happens in real time as you enter your word or phrase.
Note that you can enter only one search term, which will be searched for literally. If you type “find me”, only conversations containing the two words “find me” next to each other and in that order will be shown. You cannot use boolean operators like “or” or “and”. Since the filtering is instant, you can quickly try various keywords.
If you find a conversation about your subject, start with reading all the messages in that conversation. If you have any further comments or questions on that conversation, reply to the existing conversation instead of starting a new one. That way, the thread of the conversation will stay together, and others can instantly see what you’re talking about. It doesn’t matter if the conversation is a year old. If you reply to it, it will move to the top automatically.
The left hand half of the Forum pane shows two lists. The one at the top shows conversations. The bottom one shows the messages in the selected conversation. You can change the order of the conversations and messages by clicking on the column headers in the lists. A conversation talks about one specific topic. In other forums, a conversation is sometimes called a thread.
If you want to talk about a topic that doesn’t have a conversation yet, click the New button to start a new conversation. A new entry will appear in the list of conversations with an edit box. Enter a brief subject for your conversation (up to 100 characters) and press Enter. Please write a clear subject such as “scraping an HTML table in Perl” rather than “need help with HTML” or just “help”. A clear subject significantly increases the odds that somebody who knows the answer will actually click on your conversation, read your question and reply. A generic scream for help only gives the impression you’re too lazy to enter a clear subject, and most forum users don’t like helping lazy people.
After typing in your subject and pressing Enter, the keyboard focus will move to the box empty box where you can enter the body text of your message. Please try to be as clear and descriptive as you can. The more information you provide, the more likely you’ll get a timely and accurate answer. If your question is about a particular regular expression, don’t forget to attach your regular expression or test data. Use the forum’s attachment system rather than copying and pasting stuff into your message text.
If you want to reply to an existing conversation, select the conversation and click the Reply button. It doesn’t matter which message in the conversation you selected. Replies are always to the whole conversation rather than to a particular message in a conversation. RegexMagic doesn’t thread messages like newsgroup software tends to do. This prevents conversations from veering off-topic. If you want to respond to somebody and bring up a different subject, you can start a new conversation, and mention the new conversation in a short reply to the old one.
When starting a reply, a new entry will appear in the list of messages. Enter a summary of your reply (up to 100 characters) and press Enter. Then you can enter the full text of your reply, just like when you start a new conversation. However, doing so is optional. If your reply is very brief, simply leave the message body blank. When you send a reply without any body text, the forum system will use the summary as the body text, and automatically prepends [nt] to your summary. The [nt] is an abbreviation for “no text”, meaning the summary is all there is. If you see [nt] on a reply, you don’t need to click on it to see the rest of the message. This way you can quickly respond with “Thank you” or “You’re welcome” and other brief courtesy messages that are often sadly absent from online communication.
When you’re done with your message, click the Send button to publish it. There’s no need to hurry clicking the Send button. RegexMagic will forever keep all your messages in progress, even if you close and restart RegexMagic, or refresh the forums. Sometimes it’s a good idea to sleep on a reply if the discussion gets a little heated. You can have as many draft conversations and replies as you want. You can read other messages while composing your reply. If you’re replying to a long question, you can switch between the message with the question and your reply while you’re writing.
One of the greatest benefits of RegexMagic’s built-in forums is that you can directly attach regular expressions, test data, regex libraries, source code templates and GREP actions. Simply click the Attach button and select the item you want to attach. You can add the same item more than once. E.g. to add two regular expressions, click on the first one in the History, click the Attach button and choose Regular Expression. Then click on the second regex and click Attach, Regular Expression again.
To attach a screen shot, press the Print Screen button on the keyboard to capture your whole desktop. Or, press Alt+Print Screen to just capture the active window (e.g. RegexMagic’s window). Then switch to the Forum tab, click the Attach button, and select Clipboard. You can also attach text you copied to the clipboard this way.
It’s best to add your attachments while you’re still composing your message. The attachments will appear with the message, but won’t be uploaded until you click the Send button to post your message. If you add an attachment to a message you’ve written previously, it will be uploaded immediately. You cannot attach anything to messages written by others. Write your own reply, and attach your data to that.
To check out an attachment uploaded by somebody else, click the Use or Save button. The Use button will load the attachment directly into RegexMagic. This may replace your own data. E.g. the Test tab can hold only one sample, so using an attachment with test data will replace whatever you typed or loaded into the Test tab. If you click the Save button, RegexMagic will prompt for a location to save the attachment. RegexMagic will not automatically open attachments you save.
RegexMagic automatically compresses attachments in memory before uploading them. So if you want to attach an external file, there’s no need to compress it using a zip program first. If you compress the file manually, everybody who wants to open it will have to decompress it manually. If you let RegexMagic compress it automatically, decompression will also be automatic.
If you regret anything you wrote, simply delete it. There are three Delete buttons. The one above the list of conversations deletes the whole conversation. You can only delete a conversation if nobody else participated in it. The Delete button above the edit box for the message body deletes that message, if you wrote it. The Delete button above the list of attachments deletes the selected attachment, if it belongs to a message that you wrote.
If somebody already downloaded your message before you got around to deleting it, it won’t vanish magically. The message will disappear from their view of the forums the next time they log onto the forums or click Refresh. If you see messages disappear when you refresh your own view of the forums, that means the author of the message deleted it. If you replied to a conversation and the original question disappears, leaving your reply as the only message, you should delete your reply too. Otherwise, your reply will look silly all by itself. When you delete the last reply to a conversation, the conversation itself is also deleted, whether you started it or not.
If you think you could better phrase something you wrote earlier, select the message and then click the Edit button above the message text. You can then edit the subject and/or body text of the message. Click the Send button to publish the edited message. It will replace the original. If you change your mind about editing the message, click the Delete button. Make sure to click it only once! When editing a message, clicking Delete will revert the message to what it was before you started editing it. If you click Delete a second time (i.e. while the message is no longer being edited), you’ll delete the message from the forum.
If other people have already downloaded your message, their view of the message will magically change when they click Refresh or log in again. Since things may get confusing if people respond to your original message before they see the edited message, it’s best to restrict your edits to minor errors like spelling mistakes. If you change your opinion, click the Reply button to add a new message to the same conversation.
When you click the Login button, RegexMagic automatically downloads all new conversations and message summaries. Message bodies are downloaded one conversation at a time as you click on the conversations. Attachments are downloaded individually when you click the Use or Save button.
RegexMagic keeps a cache of conversations and messages that persists when you close RegexMagic. Attachments are cached while RegexMagic is running, and discarded when you close RegexMagic. By caching conversations and messages, RegexMagic improves the responsiveness of the forum while reducing the stress on the forum server.
If you keep RegexMagic running for a long time, RegexMagic will not automatically check for new conversations and messages. To do so, click the Refresh button.
Whenever you click Login or Refresh, all conversations and messages are marked as “read”. They won’t have any special indicator in the list of conversations or messages. If the refresh downloads new conversation and message summaries, those will be marked “unread”. This is indicated with the same “people” icon as shown next to the Login button.