The CheckMates Blog

There's a lot going on in the CheckMates community these days and it can be difficult to keep up!
With that in mind, we'd like to bring your attention to two important features on CheckMates that can help:

• Subscribing to a Forum/Category
• Subscribing to specific terms used throughout the community

By "subscribing" you will get an email when a new post is created in the relevant Forum/Category or with a matching search term. This will allow you to more easily follow topics that are relevant to you. 

Subscribing to a Forum or Category is quite simple:

1. Navigate to the desired forum/category (e.g. CloudMates)
2. Select Subscribe from the Gear menu: 

Each time a message is posted in any of the CloudMates forums, you will get an email.

Search Subscriptions work on the same principle: you will receive email anytime a particular search term is posted to the community. To enable this feature, go to your settings as follows:

 Then select Subscriptions & Notifications > Search Subscriptions:

A few notes:

• Up to 5 search queries are allowed per user separated by a comma, which is treated as an OR.
• Words may only contain the following characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9 ,  _ + - : () \" & * ? | ! {} [ ] ^ ~ \\ @ = # % $ ' /. Other characters are removed.
• Regular expressions and operators will work, which makes the five search query limit more manageable. For example, if 'apples AND oranges, pears OR bananas' is entered, a notification will be sent if either:
  • A post contains both 'apples' and 'oranges'
  • A post contains either ‘pears’ or ‘bananas’ 
• You will only be notified once even if a post has the keywords mentioned repeatedly.
• No notification is sent if a post has the keyword in the Subject line of the post only, it must be contained in the post body.
• When you change this setting, it will take approximately 15 minutes to take effect.
• To disable the feature, delete the search query and click Save.

You may wish to further adjust your notifications in Subscriptions & Notifications > Notification Settings to adjust the frequency of notifications or to receive certain ones in digest form.

If you prefer to subscribe to search terms via an RSS feed, you can also do that:

As always, we're here to serve and appreciate your continued patronage!

We are aware of some issues in the community reading most community messages (e.g. "Unexpected Error Has Occurred").
This was first noticed around 5pm Pacific Time (01:00 UTC) and has been resolved as of about 7pm Pacific (03:00 UTC).

On 5th November 2020, we will be migrating to a new "groups" feature in the community that will impact availability of some parts of the community, specifically:

• All the groups under Local User Groups
• Any private groups (e.g. the CCSM Group)
• Region-specific Partner groups

During the migration, which is expected to complete the same day, access to the above parts of the community will result in error messages.
We expect to restore access to these groups once the migration has been completed and a few supporting code changes are pushed.
Other parts of the community should be unaffected by this.

We recently made a few changes to our active member community ranks to hopefully make them a bit easier to understand than the precious metals/stones ranks we had prevously.
They are now as follows:

• Newcomer (Everyone starts here)
• Explorer
  
• Participant
• Contributor
• Collaborator
• Specialist
• Advisor
• Leader
  
• Mentor
• Authority
• Champion
• Legend (Highest rank)

Anyone with a rank of Leader or above will have a special flair next to their name.
Note that the basic ranking formulas haven't changed and are based on time in community, posts, comments, and kudos.
That said, we have a few less levels now and combined a couple of the ranking tiers.

Note that we've maintained the existing passive community member ranks, which are still:

• Onlooker
• Bystander
• Beholder
• Spectator
• Bookworm

Understanding technology is a challenge. 

Complex concepts, rapid changes, new paradigms, overwhelming details, tools to master, time pressure - all those things might be tough to cope with.

As a member of CheckMates, you deserve the best. That's why we have created a new Space on CheckMates - Check Point for Beginners. It is members' exclusive space where we will be posting learning materials: videos, articles, lab manuals,  even history overviews - to help you out and to make understanding and mastering Check Point easier, less stressful and more productive. 

To do so, go here: Check Point for Beginners 2.0 

Note: You have to be a member of CheckMates to get full access to the materials. Please register with your UserCenter account. Create one, if you do not have it yet.