Tom Lachecki

Hi all, you were absolutely correct! I had switched off my antivirus/firewall (or so it led me to believe), restarted my pc and still no joy. However upon uninstalling ZoneAlarm and restarting the pc the Stock panel is working perfectly. I am bemused as to why it would say it was disabled when it obviously wasn't.
Regardless, I want to thank you all for your time, patience and guidance with this. It's made my day.

Hi All, I apologise for the delay in a fix for this issue. When we released our 2.3 update it included what we believed would be a fix for this problem as all seemed to be well here with our internal testing. Unfortunately this wasn't the case so this is now being re investigated. I apologise for my lack of updates in this thread I'll make sure to post here as soon as I get any extra info.
Thanks
C

I suspect you would find it quite difficult to find even one other regular contributor to this community that shares that opinion, or perhaps more to the point that if accepted would not lead to huge numbers of posts that were of interest to very few if any Affinity users, making it considerably more difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
Regardless, you asked here for opinions about what is acceptable to post the the Share Your Work forum, & you have gotten many replies to that, none of which agree with yours, despite all your followup posts trying to justify yours.
Perhaps it's time to give it a rest & move on to more productive uses of your time & ours? 

Your V1 purchase from the Microsoft Store is still in your Microsoft Store account, and you can look in your purchases there to find them. But, by default, the Store has a Filter set to show only programs installed on the computer. You need to change that Filter to see your older purchases that are not installed.
For more, please see the FAQ:
 

Thanks. Those options seem related to file access, not to network access, but network access (Firewall) seems to be the issue for the problem you're reporting.

The last thing you said was that it was solved. When did it start happening again, and what changed in your system at that time?

If you are opening a document file (such as any native Affinity file) you should see an accurate representation of what was saved in that file.  If there was a locked background layer when the file was saved, you should see one when you open it; if there was not, then it should not be there when you open it.
 
When you "open" an image file which does not natively have a concept of layers by itself, the content of that file needs to go somewhere, meaning a layer needs to be created for it (Publisher is not actually opening the image file directly, but rather creating a new Publisher document and setting it to match the content of the image file; a Publisher document needs a layer to store that content).  Traditionally (I believe originating from Photoshop), that layer is called "Background" and is locked to prevent the user from accidentally moving it out of position.

Try Creating Missing Folder if Missing
I purchased Affinity software many years ago and installed it on an older Mac Book. I wanted to install it on a newer device, but I had to sign in first. I couldn't sign in because I never registered my purchase/product. I fired up my old Mac where it's installed, and I received the same error messages in this thread--Hello. My old Mac runs High Sierra and can't be updated any further than that. For me, the "Affinity Photo" folder, where this thread says to copy the file "afreg.cfg" (where in other cases the file might need to be copied to "Affinity Publisher," "Affinity Designer," etc.), didn't exist--so, I created the folder "Affinity Photo", then I copied the "afreg.cfg" to it. I started my Affinity Photo software, tried to register, and this time it worked!
I see missing folders in some of these previous posts too, and hope that this might help someone in the future.

This is such a nice addition!!  Works perfectly here.

Hey Walt,
The app is requesting permission from the operating system for some networking features. The main reason for this is an experimental feature to optimise delivery of Affinity content between devices on your local network. This feature is not yet available to testers. You can reject the permission if you wish.

Thanks!

What good would knowing Build be good for?
In the case of the production version, only the first three digits are interesting, which clearly determine the SW version.
Only with Beta, the individual versions are also different from the Build version, and that is why they are listed here on the forum.

You're a magnificent human being (hope you really are). Thanks, Sean. It worked!

Hi All,
Thanks again for all your continued help with this release. We are getting very close to launch. This will be the final beta build before what will hopefully be our first release candidate next week. For that reason we are not really making any further significant changes (or anything which could be considered risky). 
The main thing I want to make you all aware of is that we have decided to not release the cross-references feature with 2.1. For that reason this feature has been removed from this week's build.
Any documents you may have created which include cross references will still open (and they will even still update), but you will not be able to edit or create new cross-references in 2.1. We understand this might be disappointing for some of you, however we will be moving into 2.2 beta very shortly after 2.1 release, and as soon as a 2.2 beta is available that will include cross-references again (and will definitely make it to 2.2 release!)
We have made this decision primarily as we have been working on adding better formatting options (as have been requested on these forums) into the feature, but we have not quite managed to get it to a point where we feel it will be releasable in time - and considering all the other great stuff / fixes we have put into 2.1 we don't want to delay the whole of 2.1 because of it.

Other than that in this build it's mostly just fixes which you can see in this thread.
Thanks,
Ash

We do support "use".
This particular document is technically invalid SVG due to the circular reference on #s, but it seems many apps silently ignore it and proceed anyway, so that's what we'll do  

We do support "use".
This particular document is technically invalid SVG due to the circular reference on #s, but it seems many apps silently ignore it and proceed anyway, so that's what we'll do  

I noticed that the popup message changed from the previous version, it now states ensure that the firewall does not prevent communication on the network.
I have now added all the Affinity apps to the AVG Allowed Apps under their Ransomware Shield.
Have restarted all 3 apps and no errors, will try again on my next reboot and see what happens.
For now though it seems to have solved this issue.
 

We do support "use".
This particular document is technically invalid SVG due to the circular reference on #s, but it seems many apps silently ignore it and proceed anyway, so that's what we'll do  

This thing is scary...

@Tom Lachecki thanks for looking into this. I was curious how ChatGPT would respond. It did generate a correct SVG this time correcting circular references, but still with the broken stars 

This works now (for reference):
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 7410 3900"> <rect width="7410" height="3900" fill="#bd3d44"/> <path d="M0,450H7410m0,600H0m0,600H7410m0,600H0m0,600H7410m0,600H0" stroke="#fff" stroke-width="300"/> <rect width="2964" height="2100" fill="#192f5d"/> <g fill="#fff" id="stars" transform="scale(0.062)"> <g id="fiveStarRow"> <g id="star" transform="scale(0.1) rotate(144)"> <path id="pentagon" d="M12,-36 l24,70h-60z"/> <use href="#pentagon" transform="scale(-1,1)"/> </g> <use href="#star" x="247"/> <use href="#star" x="494"/> <use href="#star" x="741"/> <use href="#star" x="988"/> </g> <use href="#fiveStarRow" y="90"/> <use href="#fiveStarRow" y="180"/> <use href="#fiveStarRow" y="270"/> <use href="#fiveStarRow" y="360"/> <use href="#fiveStarRow" y="450"/> <g id="sixStarRow" transform="translate(123.5,45)"> <use href="#star"/> <use href="#star" x="247"/> <use href="#star" x="494"/> <use href="#star" x="741"/> <use href="#star" x="988"/> <use href="#star" x="1235"/> </g> <use href="#sixStarRow" y="135"/> <use href="#sixStarRow" y="225"/> <use href="#sixStarRow" y="315"/> <use href="#sixStarRow" y="405"/> </g> </svg>  

Affirm that Photo does not import the plugins pref, and all apps didn't import the Toolbar pref for Icon & Text.
But THANK YOU, THANK YOU for importing the actual Studio layout from the working versions! That has always been such a PITA having to rest those up. 

Yes - I'll look into that.
Update: Found the oversight - should be fixed in the next build  

Yes - I'll look into that.
Update: Found the oversight - should be fixed in the next build  

The next version  

Yes - I'll look into that.
Update: Found the oversight - should be fixed in the next build  

Yes - I'll look into that.
Update: Found the oversight - should be fixed in the next build