Terms of use

FabIS Support is run by Fabrication Information Systems (“FabIS”, “we”). It is a community and support site for fabricators using Tekla PowerFab and other FabIS products: a forum, a library, and — for FabIS clients — a private space for their shop and a response window on their questions.

By registering, or by using the site, you agree to these terms. If you register on behalf of your company, you are confirming you are allowed to. We record the date you accepted and which version of these terms you were shown.

Every account is approved by hand. We look at who you are and where you work before you can see anything, and if your shop is already here, your own account owner looks first.

One person, one account. You sign in with a link we email to the address on your account; there is no password. Anyone who can read that mailbox can act as you, so guard it the way you would a password, and tell us if you think somebody else has used your link. What is done under your sign-in is your responsibility.

Register with your company email address. Personal addresses such as Gmail are not accepted; if your shop has no company address, contact us.

We may decline a registration, and we may suspend or remove an account, at our discretion — including for anything in section 10. A suspended or removed account can no longer sign in, and loses access to the forum and to any private space. What happens to your posts is in section 8.

FabIS Support is for fabricators: shops running PowerFab, and the people who work for them. That is who the forum is for, and it is why every registration is checked.

Consultants and other firms that compete with FabIS are not admitted. That is not a judgement on anyone; a forum where shops help each other stops working the moment it becomes a marketplace, and we would rather say so here than leave a registration waiting.

We work alongside Tekla support. FabIS Support is coaching and community from Fabrication Information Systems. Tekla's own support team handles software defects, licensing, and installation. When a question belongs with them, we'll say so on the thread and point you there, so you're never waiting on the wrong people.

What we cover is the how: setup, workflow, and getting PowerFab to fit the way your shop actually runs.

We do not speak for Trimble or Tekla. Nothing posted on this site, by us or by a member, is a statement from them.

This is not training either. FabIS Support answers the intermediate and advanced questions that come up once PowerFab is running your shop. Teaching the software itself — the setup, the first jobs, getting your people confident in it — is a different job, and we do it in your building rather than in a thread. Onsite work is quoted separately.

Community is free. No card, now or later, and it is not a trial. It gives you the public forum, the public library, and answers from other shops running PowerFab every day. FabIS answers public threads at its discretion; when we do, the answer is public and stays searchable.

What it does not give you, said plainly so nobody reads a promise into it:

• No response window. Nothing on a Community thread is guaranteed — not an answer, not an acknowledgment, not a time.
• No notification email about the forum. We do not email you when a thread of yours is answered, and there is no digest. You come and look, and the forum shows you what is new. You still get your sign-in link and mail about your account, because there is no other way in.
• No private space, no private threads to FabIS, and no included sessions.
• No webinar seat. Webinars are announced to Community; seats are part of the paid tiers.

FabIS also offers paid tiers to its clients: Support, and a Fractional PowerFab Administrator tier that is assigned by FabIS and cannot be bought. Neither is sold on this site. When a company takes one, what it includes, what it costs, and the response window that comes with it are set out in the agreement for that tier, which is supplied with it and applies alongside these terms. Until your company has one, these terms describe everything you get.

You own what you post. By posting it, you give FabIS and the other members the right to read it, and you give FabIS the right to keep it in the forum, to show it in search, and to move, edit or remove it where it breaks these terms or has landed somewhere it should not.

Only post what you have the right to share. A client's drawings, another vendor's confidential material, and anything you are under an agreement not to disclose stay out. Screenshots of your own PowerFab are fine — but a screenshot can carry your customers' names and numbers, and the public forum is visible to every approved member, so check it before it goes up.

If something lands in public that should not have, tell us. We can take the post down, and where your company has a private space, we can move the whole thread into it, history and all.

Public posts stay. A thread with the answer taken out of it is useless to the next shop, so when you leave — or your account is removed — your public posts stay in the forum, under your name. If a particular post has something in it that should not be there, tell us and we will take it down.

Private content stays while your company has an account. When the account closes, nobody at the company can sign in and the private space is no longer reachable. We keep its private threads, attachments, and any session recordings and notes for 12 months after closure, so they can be restored if you come back, and remove them from the forum after that. Your account owner can ask us to remove them sooner.

Some records outlast the content. Our own record that a thread existed — who asked, when, and how it was handled — stays as part of your company's history with us, along with the record that your account existed. Copies can also persist in backups for a time after something is removed.

An account that goes quiet is not removed for it.

What we collect. When you register: your name, work email, company, your role, whether you use PowerFab, and which parts of it you work in. As you use the site: what you post, the sign-in links we send you and when they are used, the email we send you and whether it was delivered, and — if you turn on browser notifications — the browser you turned them on from. The public forms count requests by a short-lived hash of the address they came from, to stop abuse; the address itself is not kept.

What it is for. Running the site: approving you, signing you in, showing who wrote what, and, for paid tiers, running the private space and the response window. FabIS staff can see your company's history with us — registrations, threads, sessions — so the next person who picks up your question knows what came before.

What other members see. Your name, your role, your company's name, and any bio you write, on your forum profile and beside your posts. There is no member directory on this site, and we do not publish who runs what, where.

What we do not do. We do not sell it. The forum is closed: nobody sees a post without an approved account, and nothing in it is open to the public.

Who else handles it. Email goes through a mail provider. The forum runs on Discourse, on servers we operate. Screen shares run on Microsoft Teams.

To see or correct what we hold about you, or to ask for something to be removed, write to [email protected]. Section 8 says what we can remove and what stays.

Short, because the forum is small and everyone in it is at work.

• No harassment. Disagree with the answer, not the person.
• No spam, and no advertising.
• No soliciting other members — for work, for a product, or for a job.
• No scraping, and no copying the forum out in bulk.
• No posting credentials, licence keys, or anyone else's data.
• One account, yours, used by you.

Answers on a forum are not professional advice. What you read here comes from other members and from FabIS staff drawing on experience. It is not engineering, legal, accounting, or safety advice, and it is not a guarantee about your PowerFab setup. You decide what to do in your own shop, and you check it before you rely on it.

The site is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available at any particular time, or free of errors, or that any thread will be answered. The only response promises we make are the ones in a paid tier's agreement, on the terms written there.

Limits on liability. To the extent the law allows, FabIS is not liable to you for lost business, lost profit, or lost data, or for any indirect loss, arising from the site or from anything posted on it. Because Community costs nothing, our total liability to you for anything to do with a Community account is limited to one hundred US dollars. For a paid tier, the agreement for that tier says what applies.

Nothing in this section limits a liability the law does not allow to be limited.

We may change these terms. When we do, the site asks you to accept the new version the next time you use it, and keeps asking until you do. The “in force since” date at the top of this page is the date the version you are reading took effect.

These terms are governed by the law of the State of North Carolina.

Questions, complaints, and requests about any of this go to [email protected]. We would rather hear about a problem than find it.