Hi Forumites............

There was a recent thread whereby a new forum member admitted to having previously used a 'crack' to enable his use of SolidWorks software. Further in the thread he went on to say that the majority of the nation in which he resides would also be using 'cracked' software because according to the thread's author there is no VAR in that nation. This was disproved however. The author promptly hid his photo and then changed his title, but the damage was done. This is the thread of which I speak............

Now, I really don't want a discussion about the ethics of this person, but what really got me thinking was a comment made by in which he stated,

"I think it's time to have to enter some sort of valid Solidworks code for access to the forum. No doubt there are many people who have cracked versions using all the valuable knowledge saved within threads on the forum who are getting a freeride."

I personally think this has merit, but with a little tweaking perhaps and I was curious as to what other folks thought.

I was thinking that perhaps it could work along the lines of anybody within the public community can 'View' the forum only, that is all they can do period. But if you want to be able to interact within the forum, then as Richard suggests, you would need a valid licence code, (NOT subscription). This way, only legitimate people would be able to pose those questions to which they need answers. The others without validity would have to search the forum and hope that their issue has been raised or resolved before.

I then thought that there might be an issue with forum member validation between the forum (JIVE) and SolidWorks but surely this could be circumvented many ways even if it was just by logging into the forum via the software (auto-validation).

Having learnt so much here myself (and still doing so), I definitely would not want to propose to do anything that would intentionally stunt the growth of anyone doing the right thing, which is why I am asking for all of your opinions.

With the recent departure of our friend I'm really not sure who from Corporation might be able to express some thought into this either.

Dave.