Getting help is easy, and we're making it even easier. Just click 'Help' on the main Menu. If you are visiting the front page of the website, clicking help once will take you to the main help page, which answers questions and explains things that every site visitor should know. If you click 'Help' while you're viewing that page, it brings you here. This is the help page for those just getting started.

There are many more help pages available. These may be accessed by clicking 'Help' on the menu from any page on the site. The information presented will often be the main help page, but we will soon have pages which provide help for any particular page you might be viewing. This is called 'context help' because it will attempt to answer more detailed questions based on what you're probably trying to do at the time. Please bear with us because the context help pages are brand new and many are still being written. There is also a very detailed page dedicated to those creating forum and weblog posts, available from a link named 'Help' (of course) from the page where you create forum/weblog articles. That particular page does not have the normal page menu on the side, so look for the Help link at the bottom of the page. Any other time, just look for the main Menu (on the side) and select 'Help' from it. I'll explain the main Menu in just a second...

The main Menu and several other menus are usually located on the left hand side of the page. All of the menu items are 'collapsible'. Allow me to explain that... Look on the side of the page for the item (just below the 'login' or 'logout' link) which says 'Content'. It might be all capitalized and say 'CONTENT'. Either way, this will usually have a little blue arrow beside it. Now click the word 'Content'. Go ahead, and don't worry, you'll still be reading this page. The items beneath the word will vanish. Poof! Don't fret. They aren't gone, they're just hidden. Now click it again. Presto! The items re-appear.

You may suddenly realize that there are several more of these little blue arrows on the page. Some of these have links beneath them and some don't. If you click on a menu which has links beneath it, the links will 'collapse' and be hidden from view. If you click on a menu which doesn't seem to have any links, you may find that it actually does - they will appear after you click it. Be aware that we often allow you to do a lot of things as you browse the site, but we don't want to make the page overly cluttered with links. These little blue arrows are the key. Whenever you seen one by itself somewhere, it usually means that there is a menu full of choices hidden beneath it.

For example, there is such a menu on each and every article on this site called 'Actions'. Whenever you are looking at an interesting article, you can click 'Actions' and find other things you can do which are associated with that particular article. These may include such things as voting/ranking, adding comments, sending a link to a friend, emailing the author...etc.

Also on the side of the page just below 'Content' is yet another menu called 'Community' (and even another one called 'Tools', and 'Reference'). We have these because our menu got to be too big. These are where you can find all kinds of other things to do. If you are authenticated (if you've typed in a username and password so we know who you are), you will find links to post new articles and view your profile. There are also several general purpose 'Reference' resources (hence the name) which we provide to everybody. A dictionary, calculator, conversion tables, a photo rating system - all kinds of stuff. Have a look.

Why should you register? Because it is the only way we know your name. If you register as 'Bob' and verify that you are 'Bob' by typing in Bob's password, we know it's you. Without this step, anybody can claim to be Bob - and we don't know any better. We really want to know that it's you, and not just anybody. That's what registration and authentication is all about.

Unfortunately there are some people on the internet who do bad things. Sometimes they will try and impersonate you. Sometimes they'll try and do bad things to our website. This is another reason why we want to know that it's really you, but it also will explain why the registration process may seem complicated. We use what's called an 'email verification system'. In a nutshell, you tell us your name and give us your email address when you register. We send you an email. You read the email from us and click on a link we send you. Then you can login. I wish we could just let you register, choose a password and just let you in without all this email verification stuff (and we did a long time ago). Unfortunately, the bad guys look for websites that don't require verification and do bad things to them. One day, we had half a million people register on this site. The only thing is, we didn't have half a million visitors that day. We only had one bad guy. I won't go into all the technical details as to why email verification solves this problem. The important thing is that it does.

Now some of you may be worried about giving out your email address, and rightfully so. You probably know about the bad guys already. You probably don't like getting spam email and you may also know that these guys hunt all over the internet for more email addresses to add to their collection. The only way to prevent getting your email address on a spam list is to keep it from being seen on the internet, period.

We don't like spam either. So we've made certain that the email addresses our members give us can't be seen by anybody. They're locked in our vault. We don't 'obscure' them like some websites and make them look funny (I'm sure you've seen email addresses like 'joe at nospam dot foo dot com'). The bad guys can and do have tools to re-assemble these automatically and add them to their spam collection. We keep them from being shown, period. We aren't going to sell your address to bad guys, ever. And if we ever need to contact you on behalf of another member, we'll send the message. The other member won't ever see your address.

Oh, and we don't like clutter either. You can choose whether or not you want us to send alerts that you've got mail waiting or that somebody has responded to one of your articles. Usually these are helpful. If you don't like 'em, go to the Profile page and find the checkbox that says 'Notify me by mail...' and uncheck it. (You'll need to have an account to access the profile page).

There aren't any checkboxes to tell us not to send you marketing material and routine announcements and ads for cheap mortgages like on many other sites. The reason is that we don't send any of this stuff.

A couple of other registration things you should probably know. At the present time, the U.S. government is likely to pass a law requiring us to know how old you are. Unfortunately, even though the law hadn't been signed at the time this was written, we've still got to know your age. The reason is that if it is passed (which looks very likely), we'll need to know the ages of everybody that ever signed up here, even those that signed up before the law passed.

So we ask your age. Please don't lie (although if you are an adult female, you will usually be excused for substituting the number '2' for any subsequent decade). If you're under 13, there are several items in your personal profile that you won't be able to set. This is intentional and is not a bug in the software.

If you are really, really concerned about privacy, we allow you to register as an 'invisible' member. You can still do anything that any other member can do, but you're hidden and can't be seen. We only guarantee that your personal profile won't be seen by others, and if you really want to be invisible you shouldn't interact with other folks; but in fact we've done a better job of hiding you than we claim. It still may not be perfect, but if you avoid writing to folks and stay out of the chat rooms you won't show up on the radar anywhere. Every message has an author and every person in a chat room has a name. We can't change that. If you do these activities, we'll still try and keep folks from knowing that it's you, but they'll still know there is somebody lurking about.