SDL Community FAQ

Note: Comments are disabled for this FAQ. If you have a question or suggestion about the SDL Community, please use Community Feedback.

Are product communities for obtaining support from SDL?
No. Product communities are designed for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing only. Customers with a support contract can log into the Customer Gateway for urgent problems or issues.

Do I have to be registered to use the SDL Community?
Anyone can read messages in public spaces, but you must be a registered member to post a question or response. Simply click on join/sign up to register free of charge.

Are there Terms of Use?
Please see our Terms of Use, but suffice to say that spam, defamation, obscenity, and bigotry are not tolerated and perpetrators will be banned. 

What is proper community etiquette?
Find the community etiquette here.

Always be courteous; there are different levels of experience represented. Use the following guidelines:

• Confidential or Proprietary Content: SDL will not publish any document that is confidential or proprietary in nature.
• Questions/Discussions: When asking a question type in the "Ask a question" field in a forum or use the + New button. Provide all of the details that other members of the community need to understand your entry, including your product version, for example SDL TMS 10.1. If you encounter a poorly worded question, provide suggestions to help the community member asking the question provide more clarity.
• Documents: You can either upload a document using Insert > Insert Image/Video/File in the editor.
• File: You can either upload a File using Insert > Insert Image/Video/File in the editor.
• Proofreading: Use both spelling and grammar checkers (or a good proofreader) to ensure correct spelling and take a few moments to review your documents. Remember that automated spell checkers have limitations so it is important to perform a final, manual review.
• References to other SDL content: Use the following guidelines when providing references to SDL documentation or knowledge base documents:

  • Do not copy and paste from another document unless you use double quotes around the text and use an in-text citation.

  • If you paraphrase from another document, make sure you indicate the page number where you found the information and include that document in your reference.

• After receiving a answer to your question it is a Best Practice to verify the answer as correct. This enables others to find answers to their questions faster and easily also you will receive 3 points for verifying an answer.

How can I contact a moderator to report a spammer?
Please click underneath a post on More > Flag as spam/abuse to let us know of any abuse, spam, or other terms of service violation in our community. 

Is the FAQ available in other languages?
Not at this time, we are working on this.

Are there communities in other languages?
Yes. We have communities in Chinese and Japanese.

How is community content organized?

• Communities are a collection of spaces and sub-spaces. Often, spaces are used to organize communities into a tree-like structure so members can find the right topics more easily.
• The actual communities contain sub-spaces where individual discussions take place, knowledge is shared, and the latest activity for the community can be viewed.
• Discussions (or Threads) are a collection of posts for a single conversation. Threads are most commonly used to post a question and to receive responses to that question. SDL Community uses a fully-threaded format.
• Other community applications with valuable content are Blogs and Wiki's, they can be found in the different sub-spaces.

Does the SDL Community have rewards and badges?
Please see our SDL Community – Rewards & Recognition FAQ. 

What browsers are officially supported?
Our platform works with most current web browsers. Note that if you need to use Content Editor features such as cut and paste, script access to the Clipboard should not be disabled.

Minimum screen resolution:  1024 x 768.  Results may vary if you use zoom or adjust your view to levels other than 100%

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10, and 11.
• Apple Safari 5, 5.1, 6.0 (on Macs only)
• Mozilla Firefox*
• Google Chrome*

* The Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers are released frequently. We make every effort to test and support the latest version.

I have an excellent blog entry that answers a very complex user question. Can I just post a link as the answer?
Unfortunately, a link is not an answer. It’s a location of relevant and correct material to answer the question. And while the link to the blog is probably very useful, it will be flagged for review by the system moderators who are dedicated to ensuring the Community Platform is not susceptible to spam or any forms of promotion.

The best approach is always to “Answer in the Question/Discussion” and in this case, that would mean providing enough content to address the question and answer it completely--if not in absolute detail at least to the extent that it achieves content correctness. Additional resources such as links to relevant and correct material can be offered as “for more information” or further explanation, but the answer should be complete. If an external blog entry is being linked, please provide a substantive quote from the blog entry to add context for users.

What about external documentation?
The same applies to doc references. You can provide a link to the specific doc section/page. But also provide a substantive quote from the doc section being referenced. Remember that users who come to your post in the future may no longer be able to access a link if it has broken, so the quote will help "future-proof "the discussion.

Can community members include links to external sites (blog posts, documentation, personal resources) as part of their signature file?
No, per our community guidelines, you cannot include linkspam in your signature. If you would like to include personal information or a link to a website, please include it in the body of your profile. Moderators will ask that these types of promotional links be removed from posts answering questions, or they may simply remove the links with explanation to the responder.

I have an idea about improving the SDL Community or a particular SDL Product - How can I share it?
If your idea is for improving the way the community works then please post it in the SDL Community Ideasspace.  If your idea relates to a particular product, please locate the appropriate product space and see if it has an "Ideas" space within it where you can post your product idea.  (Please do not post product ideas in the SDL Community Ideas/Community Feedback).

The product I have an idea for, doesn't have an Idea space in it/doesn't appear to be enabled for me to create an Idea?
Not all product spaces have "Ideas" enabled within them.  For an Ideas space to be enabled, it requires that we have someone within SDL who keeps an eye on the Ideas posted, to consider/action them as appropriate.  Not all product spaces are actively managed by SDL staff (though we're working on it!) so we won't activate Ideas where they're going to appear to be ignored.