Urch Forums FAQ

You should post items for sale in the Marketplace Forum. Or if you want to buy something, please post in the Marketplace Forum also. There is a certain logic to posting, for example, GMAT books for sale in the GMAT forum, but we have chosen to keep the forums free of buyers and sellers so that the participants may focus on raising their test scores. As always, if you have any questions, please ask them in the feedback forum.

It's simple--if your title is not descriptive, not many people will read it. And there's a good chance that no one will respond to it.

Here are some examples to help you understand what I mean. A lot of posts that look like this:

• Help!
• Urgent!
• Help required!
• question

do not receive responses. Instead of using these very simple and general titles for your post, consider:

• Computer froze during GMAT test
• Deadline approaching, but I haven't received my TOEFL score
• Am I a resident or a non-resident?
• I am good at math, but weak in English. How can I improve my vocabulary?

Titles such as these generally receive more responses than the ones above.

Summary: If you don't see your post right away, it may have been automatically "moderated" by our software (which means held for review by a human). Our forum uses a variety of automated tools to help us reduce spam and other messages that we don't wish to appear in the forums. For example, we don't like off-topic advertisements, swear words, spam, excessive links, and the like. Our software is set to withhold messages based on a variety of criteria, including how long the person making the post (the "poster") has been a member, the content of the message, the poster's previous messages (also called the "posting history"), and a few other things. For example, the post made by a new member who just joined today and whose first post contains three links to unlicensed pharmacies will be held for review by a human before it appears. Members who have made more than 30 to 50 posts generally bypass this screening, although certain refractory miscreants may enjoy the benefit of this software longer than other members. For reference, some of the characters and words that will invoke moderation include: @, rolex, ringtone, urgent (Yes, too many people put that in their thread titles. No good, no good.) Excessive formatting (fonts, colors, bold, etc.) may also trigger the filter. We try to "moderate" all posts quickly, but sometimes it may take 24 to 48 hours, depending on the complexity of the messages, which moderators are online, and a few other factors beyond the control of any mortal.

In your Profile (scroll all the way to the end of the page), you may have noticed that you have a section where you can record a Secret Word (sometimes referred to as a Security Word). The Secret Word is similar to a password, but is less secure than a password, so don't use a password here. Don't worry, other members cannot see this Secret Word.

Paid subscriptions are simply paid memberships to certain parts of the forum. Many forums have special sections of the forum that you need to pay to access. Some forums charge its users a fee to make any posts at all. These fees generally run from US$5 per year to several hundred dollars per year. Many forums allow you to join for only a short period, such as a month. There are many different reasons to change money to use a forum. Some very large forums use subscriptions to offset the costs of running a forum. Others offer special benefits to those who subscribe, such as dedicated staff to answer questions. Still other forums charge a fee for access to a certain forum to afford those paying members an extra measure of privacy that they wouldn't get otherwise. Of course, many forums charge money simply because they want to make a profit. TestMagic currently has no paid sections, so paid subscriptions are not enabled at this time.

This forum software is set up so that you can print one thread at a time; there is no way (currently) to print several different pages or threads at the same time.

The Google Spider is simply the name of the "spider" that crawls the Internet searching for new content. If you see the "Google Spider" somewhere, that just means that Google is "spidering" our forums for new content. Google visits TestMagic quite frequently! Try an experiment--Google your TestMagic username to see if it shows up. Different search engines have different names, so don't be surprised if you see some other strange names.