This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion

Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules, merely guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community and keep this a clean and well-lighted place for civilized public discourse.

Keep in mind this is a public forum, so avoid posting anything your employer would consider Confidential.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

  • Name-calling
  • Ad hominem attacks
  • Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
  • Knee-jerk contradiction

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

Let’s leave our community better than we found it.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

  • Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
  • Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
  • Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
  • Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

  • Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
  • Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
  • Don’t post no-content replies.
  • Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
  • Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

Powered by You

This site is operated by your friendly local staff and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.

How Do I … ?

Here are a few tips for common things you might want to do on the Toad World forums:

  1. To post a new question or problem, or to create a reply to an existing post you first need to Log In. If you already have a Quest ID, you can click the Log In button (upper right or your screen). If you don’t have a Quest ID already, click Sign Up.
  2. You can navigate multiple ways - by Category listed by default in the left column, but latest post by default in the right column, by Search (the “magnifying glass” icon, by the most active (“Top” tab), etc.
  3. We definitely recommend looking to see if an question or issue you have has already been posted or not prior to creating a New Topic. While you are entering your post the forum will also show you potential related posts which already exist (to the right of where you are entering your post), so take a look at that also prior to posting.
  4. By default, the forums will send you weekly summary e-mails of activity if you haven’t recently visited the site. You can change how e-mails are handled for you by clicking on your picture or initial and selecting the Preferences icon (looks like a “gear”). Then you want the Emails page selected on the left menu.
  5. By default, the forums will assume you are interested in all of the categories. You can adjust how the site behaves for you for the different categories by clicking on your picture or initial and selecting the Preferences icon (looks like a “gear”), and then selecting the Categories page under Notifications. You can set the various categories to Watched, Tracked, Watching First Post, and Muted depending on how interested you are in the various product categories.
  6. There are various other settings in Preferences as well. Language to be shown is under Interface, note that this doesn’t change the text in individual posts but does change menu items, etc.
  7. You can bookmark posts you want to be able to find again later. There is a Bookmark icon in the list of icons following a post (you may need to click “…” to expand the list), the Bookmark icon looks like a vertical banner. Then to see the posts you have bookmarked, use the same icon when you click on your account menu.
  8. The Toad for Oracle product has a dedicated Beta Category due to its popularity and traffic. There are Beta programs for other Toad products as well, you can find Beta subcategories in the product categories which have active Beta programs. Beta announcement topics are “pinned” - so they should show up at the top of the list of topics until you have read them.
  9. There is an Idea Pond subcategory for many of the products. The Idea Pond can be used to submit and vote on ideas for product enhancements. You have a limited number of votes to “spend”, but you can change your votes if you run out of votes and have or see an idea which is a higher priority for you.

For all the Preferences and for icons like Bookmarks to appear you need to first Log In to the forums site.