Welcome!
We believe we understand what you want and need in an online community. Our goal is to provide the features you need to research, participate, show-off, find a job, or find help. Our hope is that you will hang your technical hat at Prestwood and participate in our many features. This programmer community was developed and is maintained by Prestwood Software. This custom community was written by Mike Prestwood from scratch. It contains NO third party web-apps. This allowed us to present a high-level of integrated features.

Sincerely,
The Prestwood Online Staff

1. Community Rules and Disclaimers

Community Goal
Our community is dedicated to positive enthusiasts. Although we understand it's important to have visibility into known defects and work-arounds, we promise to always treat each product we support with respect and with the goal of promoting it's usage. 

Email Verification Procedure
After you create your account, we will send you an email so you can verify your email with us. Once verified you will have increased rights on our family of websites. If you do not verify your email, we will send you a reminder email at increasingly longer time periods (3 days, 8 days, 20 days, 30 days, etc).

Moderated Community
This is a heavily-moderated online community with positive goals. It is our intention to work with the makers of the products we support in an effort to promote their usage. It is our believe that a negative or hostile approach to technology and online communities is not in the interest of the greater good. This is particularly prevalent with message boards and newsgroups where flaming and bad egos tend to stomp on others. We will do our best to strive for a balance between addressing the negative aspects of each product with the presentation of information.

Real-Time Content
Considering the real-time nature of our programmer community, it is impossible for us to review messages or confirm the validity of information posted. Please remember that we do not actively monitor the content of posted messages and are not responsible for any messages posted. We do not vouch for or warrant the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any message, and are not responsible for the contents of any message. The messages express the views of the author of the message, not necessarily the views of Prestwood nor any entity associated with Prestwood. Any user who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to contact us immediately. We have the ability to remove objectionable messages and we will make every effort to do so, within a reasonable time frame, if we determine that removal is necessary. This is a manual process, however, so please realize that we may not be able to remove or edit particular messages immediately.

Appropriate Content
You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use our online community to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violate law. You agree not to post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or by Prestwood. You remain solely responsible for the content of your messages.

Please note that advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are inappropriate in the Prestwood Programmer Community.

Linking to Other Websites
In your blog, MB posts, and KB articles, you can link to resources on other websites as you see fit, but our preference is that you post the material to the appropriate group here on our website. That's the only way we can be sure the resource will stay current.

Advertise Your Company or Website
We encourage you to promote your website, group, products, and/or services. We believe cross-promotion of websites is good advertising for both of us. If it's acceptable, we would also like you to add us as a resource link on your website.
 
We provide the following two features for promoting your group, company, or website:

• Resource Links Pages - The appropriate place to promote is in the Resource Links page for each appropriate group. The posted resource link shows up on that group's resource links page and in our knowledge base under the appropriate topic. In addition, we will feature your link in that group's weekly content and push it out to our eMag subscribers. We will automatically recycle your resource link in that group's weekly content no more than every six months and in our eMag no more than once a year.
   
  Note: Feel free to post your resource link in all the appropriate groups. For example, if you sell a tool that's useful for VB.Net, C#, and Delphi for .Net developers, feel free to post it to all three of those groups.
   
• Member Home Page - Your member home page is the other acceptable location to promote yourself, your company, or your website. All of your contributions are linked to your home page. Contributing to both our message boards and to the knowledge base is a great way to build up a rich home page especially if you contribute to all of our knowledge base post types. See Participation and Contributions below for more info.

Proper Online Netiquette

Please review the following:

• [Proper Online Netiquette]
   

2. Community Features Overview

Community Groups

Each group offers many features including a group specific search, knowledge base articles (from tid-bits to full articles), member blogs (multiple entry subjects), message board (Q&A), FAQ list, file library, and much more! For each group you join, you have your own group settings. You can choose to receive various group notifications such as new message board posts, new job postings, etc. Default is NO to all notifications. If you're interested in working on a task or job with Prestwood, you indicate that in each group's settings.

Features:

• Overview of all of the group's content.
• Weekly content for each group changes every Monday at 1 AM.
• You earn .25 points each day you visit.
• Knowledge base tid-bits (FAQ, tips, terms, resource links, and code snippets) show up in the group list pages.

Message Boards
Q&A! Get answers. Engage in conversations. If you're interested in becoming a message board moderator, the fist step is to join a group and indicate so in the group's settings.

Knowledge Base
Contribute your material! The KB Article types we offer are full article (longer with intro & conclusion), general (anything), news, and tid-bits (FAQ, tips, terms, resource links, and code snippets). Tid-bits also show up on the corresponding list page. 

Features:

• Members can add comments to each knowledge base post.
• Order reader comments Old to New or New to Old.
• Allow anyone to read or restrict to members-only.
• All contributions are integrated with your home page.
• Contributions are automatically published in our monthly eMag.
• Tid-bit contributions are automatically featured in the appropriate group's weekly content.

Member Blogs
A blog topic is similar to a knowledge base post but your intention from the beginning is to enter multiple posts -- multiple entries per blog topic.

Features:

• Allow reader entries or block them (your choice).
• Order entries Old to New or New to Old.
• Allow anyone to read or restrict to members-only.

3. How to participate and contribute.

The basic procedure for contributing is...

1. Sign up for an account.
2. Member Introductions Topic  Introduce yourself here!
3. Participate in conversations in our Message Boards.
4. Contribute your content to our monthly newsletter.

That's it! For types of content, browse around. Essentially we have Q&A style discussion with our message boards, tutorial or informational posts with our knowledge base, and member blogs. The knowledge base offers various types of posts and each type is integrated with your home page, the appropriate group, and our monthly eMag (automatically).

Community Managers...

President & CEO Mike Prestwood Mike has written 6 programming books, many articles, PSDP, and is the architect of ASPSuite and PSDP Online.

Chief Tech Officer Brian Prestwood Brian is the chair of the Sacramento Visual Studio.Net user group and holds several MS certificates.

The Prestwood Staff (Our Sacramento, CA Office)