Hi there,
Thanks for your interest in the NI user forums. In this post, I will go through a number of topics to help you get the most out of this community.
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Basic forum handling
The NI User Forums are based on vBulletin, the most popular and full-featured forum platform. If you want to find out more about the general features of the forum, please check out the vBulletin FAQ under this link:
vBulletin Usage FAQ
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Creating a personal forum account
If you use this forum regularely, it is highly recommended to create your personal forum account. Creating an account is free, and will give you access to many useful functions, including the ability to subscribe to threads, to participate in existing discussions, and to create new topics. Use this link to create an account:
Register forum account
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Thread subscriptions
The „thread subscription“ function is especially useful. If you want to follow specific discussions, you can subscribe to them to receive automatic email notifications about new replies. If you want to subscribe to every thread that you create or contribute to, you can make this a default setting under this link:
Edit subscription settings
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Forum member profiles
The forum allows members to present themselves with whatever personal information they would like to share . Every user has a „profile page“ that can feature various information, including information on your musical background and technical setup, a picture and links to external pages on Facebook, Myspace, Youtube etc.
To check out the profile page of a user, just click on his user name. To fill in your own forum profile, use this link:
Edit Profile
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Different account types
There are three types of regular users accounts - „Forum Newcomer“, „Forum Member“ and „NI Product Owner“.
Newly created accounts are of the „Forum Newcomer“ type. This account type cannot send personal messages to other users, in order to protect forum members from eventual spamming.
After 14 days and with a minimum post count of 20, newcomer accounts automatically convert to the full-featured „Forum Member“ account type.
An „NI Product Owner“ account officially confirms you as the owner of one or more NI products. The only functional difference that this account makes is that it skips the „Forum Newcomer“ phase, and that it allows you to post questions on the „Traktor on the Record“ Q&A sessions.
At the moment, new forum accounts have to be set to „product owner“ status manually by the forum admin. So please send me a PM if you own an NI product and want to have your account reflect this.
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Code of conduct
All aspects regarding the proper usage of this forum are detailed in the forum rules:
Forum Rules
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Official update status threads
We provide a very useful information service on these forum through the „official update status“ threads. These threads in the individual product forums will give you detailed information about the development status and features of upcoming software updates.
Simply subscribe to the threads that are relevant for you to automatically get an email notification when new information is posted.
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Forum moderators
Every individual forum has one or more volunteer moderators looking after it. The main role of moderators is to help forum newcomers, to disseminate useful information, and to make sure that the conversations among members remain respectful and constructive.
Moderators are regular distinguished members of the community, and they are on the forum as private persons like everybody else. They are not NI employees and they do not represent Native Instruments in any way.
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NI staff and the forums
Depending on their personal preference and schedule, various NI product managers, developers and designers post on the forums on a more or less regular basis. Many more of them read „their“ forums regularly.
In general, most people on the NI team are too occupied with their development projects to get deeply involved in forum discussions on a day-to-day basis. But the overall feedback on the forum is being read regularely and carefully, and especially the „feature request“ threads are valuable resources for the NI team to prioritize ideas for updates and new product versions.
If you want to send a general message to any person or team at Native Instruments directly, it's best to use the dedicated email address "feedback AT native-instruments.com"
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Tech support and the forums
While this forum can be an additional valuable resource to get help with technical problems, it's not a channel where Native Instruments provides full-featured direct tech support. If you are not entirely successful in utilizing your NI product, please make sure to first check out the comprehensive Knowledge Base using this link:
Knowledge Base
Please also keep in mind that the advice that other users give you on the forums might be well intended but inaccurate or even false, or might refer to setups that are not comparable to yours, or might be easy to misunderstand for language reasons. Suggestions and tricks recommend to you on the forums should be considered with caution and are applied at your own risk.
To get the most efficient help in the case of a persistent technical problem, please make sure to contact the NI tech support using this link:
NI Tech Support Form
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Common questions and misunderstandings
I have created a forum account, but I still don't have permission to post.
Very likely you have not received (or acted on) the automatic notification email, which includes a link to confirm your forum account. To resend this email to your email address and fully activate your account, please use the following link:
Retrigger confirmation email
Why does NI not provide tech support through this forum?
We have considered the forum as an official support channel, but several logistical aspects speak against it. NI runs a very sophisticated tech support backend that allows us to manage, analyze and document all support cases in the most efficient way. The forum does not offer this kind of advanced functionality at all.
Also, having the forum act as a secondary support channel would let many users create two support requests – one in the forum and one through the regular support system – and filtering out these duplicate requests would be a huge and wasteful task.
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I will add to this post if further relevant topics should come up.
Enjoy the forums!
Regards, Thomas
