Removing the Community toolbar

by May 3, 2018

The RAD Studio IDE contains a toolbar allowing you to log on to Community, and see messages sent to you by other users, questions and answers, and other notifications.

Recent website upgrades have caused issues with this toolbar for some users (now resolved), and we plan to remove the toolbar altogether in an upcoming version of RAD Studio.

If you have encountered issues, you can disable it in your current version of RAD Studio. The following assumes you are using RAD Studio 10.2. Adjust the version numbers appropriately if you are using an earlier version.

Disabling the Community toolbar

There are three methods you can use. Note that all of these modify your system, and you should take care and make appropriate backups.

Removing the package

This method is the most straightforward and easy.

  1. Close the IDE
  2. In Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\19.0\bin
  3. Locate ‘CommunityToolbar250.bpl’
  4. Rename it to ‘CommunityToolbar250.bpl.old’
  5. Start the IDE.

Editing the registry

Editing the registry can damage your system. Take care.

  1. Close the IDE
  2. Open the registry editor (regedit)
  3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\19.0\Known IDE Packages
  4. Locate the entry, ‘$(BDS)\Bin\CommunityToolbar250.bpl’ with a value of ‘Embarcadero Community Toolbar Package’
  5. Edit the string value (not the name, but the textual description of the package), and prepend two underscores, so that the value is ‘__Embarcadero Community Toolbar Package’
  6. Start the IDE.

Using a special tool

There is an IDE addin to manage the packages the IDE loads. You can find it on CodeCentral here. This is unofficial, so regard its use as at your own risk.

Build and install this into RAD Studio, and use it to disable the Community Toolbar package.

Community integration

It's important to us that the Delphi and C++Builder community is visible to you, as part of that community. We recently added upcoming events to the Welcome screen, to make these much more visible and easy to register for. Often these are run by members of our community and we encourage you to join – these also have a live Q&A in which you can ask questions and have them answered, too. In terms of our Community site, we're evaluating its role within the IDE itself. Feel free to send us feedback (you can email me at david dot millington at embarcadero.com); we value your feedback, like hearing from you and will take your thoughts into account.