I have messaged the owners of this group directly, and still haven't heard from anyone. Is it customary for questions to go unanswered because I don't have a support agreement?

I have messaged the owners of this group directly, and still haven't heard from anyone. Is it customary for questions to go unanswered because I don't have a support agreement?

Daniela Guanipa 

Daniela Guanipa said:

Is it customary for questions to go unanswered because I don't have a support agreement?

It's customary, unfortunately, for questions to go unanswered when they are posted into the last place anyone would look for them.  I just happened to be cleaning up the forums a bit today and found your post in here:

I'll move it in a minute to the Trados Studio forums, which you'll see are by far the busiest forums and seeing as your post is about Trados Studio it seems the logical place to post.  You can find it by looking under the product menu here:

Daniela Guanipa 

Trados Studio’s licensing system uses hardware and network identifiers to validate licences.  Installing NordVPN may have altered critical identifiers that the licensing system relies on, such as:

• MAC address (common for VPN services that implement virtual network adapters).
• Network Configuration (changes in DNS, IP address routing, or proxy settings).
• System Hostname Changes (some VPN tools modify these settings).

These changes can trigger the licensing system to think the software has been moved to a new machine, causing the licence to fail.

I think, if you return the licence before you turn on the VPN, and then reactivate once the VPN is running, you will most likely avoid the problem.

Perhaps you may look into the "recommendations" provided by your own system as to where to post a query before launching such "educational" response. I followed what the system recommended. I appreciate the "education" on how to post, though I believe this could've been accomplished with a less snarky post.

As you can probably imagine, after four months this is a moot point. However, in the interest of whomever may benefit from this exchange in the future, I will add that if your assumption were correct, then this issue would've been solved on its own when I completely uninstalled the VPN and connected from my home network. Sadly, it was not the case.

Daniela Guanipa 

ok - I took a look to see what it suggested:

Seems I was also wrong putting it into the Studio forums as the suggestion does make more sense... to move it into the Licence & Installation forums and not the General forums which are normally used for posts that don't have a more logical place.

To be fair, I can imagine you received different advice before as up until last week we used an LLM to try and help point users in the right direction.  Generally this was excellent and reduced the admin around moving posts manually every day.  But it did make some strange suggestions.  So we changed it to make better use of what we already have in the community since there are hundreds of thousands of posts to base the decision on.  I think the suggestion now seems better.

Daniela Guanipa 

Daniela Guanipa said:

As you can probably imagine, after four months this is a moot point.

Glad to hear it.

Daniela Guanipa said:

I will add that if your assumption were correct, then this issue would've been solved on its own when I completely uninstalled the VPN and connected from my home network.

I wouldn’t necessarily expect the licence to start working again automatically after uninstalling the VPN.  I don't know what you actually did but once the licensing system has detected a significant change in the system identifiers... such as MAC address, network configuration, or host information... it may have already invalidated the licence’s binding.  Even after removing the VPN, those altered identifiers might not revert to their original state and the support team might have had to reset it for you.