This page covers the basic of UA and who, what, why, etc. Please use a link below to jump to that section.
\r\nUtterAccess is a discussion forum with a primary focus on discussion of Microsoft Access, Office, SQL Server, and other programming and database development technologies.
\r\nWe are a family-friendly, welcoming community of volunteers, experts, MVPs, and people who generally enjoy helping others.
\r\nWe value open discussion and learning. We're not likely to do any homework assignments for anyone, but we're happy to give a nudge in the right direction and/or explain why something is the way it is, or help with a block, etc.
\r\nThe rules:
\r\nReally, it's that simple. We ban spammers and require a polite and respectful demeanor in forum discussion. Offensive content (and people) will be removed.
\r\nSome things are a given: naturally we want posts to be made in the correct areas, and private messages to members should be done via private messages rather than in the open forums, but these (and things like these) should be generally self evident and not require enumeration here (if you happen to stray for the norm a bit, don't worry - part of our learning environment can be about forum etiquette as well as databases, forms and programming, and our moderation team is happy to help).
\r\nOn the other hand, if we think you're going against the rules intentionally, we'll reach out to you.
\r\nUtterAccess is a community of volunteers, and it takes many types to keep things rolling smoothly. Here is a breakdown of our member types and their roles:
\r\nIf you notice something wrong in the forums, please feel free to use the Report button to report a post, which will give an alert to all moderators and administrators.
\r\nIf you have questions, comments or concerns that you feel should be brought to someone's attention and it is not appropriate for the Report button on a post, please feel free to reach out to the moderation team. Below is a list of our active moderators and administrators (listing the most recently active first):
\r\nWe value your privacy. Like most of you, we are not glad of the fact that our personal data is so easily obtained and handled behind closed doors.
\r\nYou will not see a GDPR banner at UA requesting permission to use cookies for tracking personal information. That's because we don't.
\r\nWe use a few of cookies required for the technical operation of the UtterAccess site, none of which contain any personal information. This is required to support:
\r\nThe IP address used to interact with the forums is received by our server(s) (due to the http protocol, this is impossible to avoid: feel free to use an anonymization service such as Tor if you wish). This IP address is stored along with the post data, for the sole purpose of aiding our battle against forum spam and abusive members and is never provided to anyone other than UA administrators and moderators.
\r\nYour email address, of course, we must have on file for registration and administrative purposes. This information is visible to moderators and administrators, and is provided to a 3rd party bulk email service (sendgrid). Your password is unreadable to anyone - including UA developers, administrators, etc. - as it is stored as a one-way hashed value and never persisted in plaintext. We run a dedicated server on the AWS infrastructure, in the us-east-1 region. This server is managed by Dymeng, the company that develops and maintains the UAv4 software (Dymeng is operated by one of UA's own core administrators).
\r\nWe use a site analytics solution called Fathom. This is a privacy-first site analytics tool that captures minimal data (and no Personally Identifable Information). Please see https://usefathom.com/ for details.
\r\nPlease understand that the UtterAccess community is one that is driven by user-content. You, the user, are posting content to a public forum, and that content will be available for everyone to see. UtterAccess has no way of knowing for sure whether the content you post includes personally identifiable information or other sensitive data. While our moderators and administrators always have an eye open for such sensitive data, you are ultimately responsible for the content you post at UA. Please do so wisely.
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