The HoHUK Village: The Village Registration Guide

So, you've found The Deaf Village, but you don't know what on earth is going on? Well, don't worry! We're here to help. Most people can find The Village a little bit dauting at first, but once you get the hang of things, it can really start to feel like home.

The first thing you'll need to do is to register with the site. The Village requires you to register before you can do anything else on the site, apart from allowing you to read these help pages, of course. It does this for a couple of reasons:

To keep people safe
To preserve accountability
To make the site easier to use

How does registration keep me safe?

By ensuring that each and every user goes through the same automatic registration process, your password (and therefore your on-line identity) is secure.

Why is accountability important?

Accountability means taking responsibility for your postings. Every user on the system has a "Screen Name" that is unique to him or her. No-one else has that name in the entire Village. When you make a posting, your Screen Name is used alongside to show people who said what. Furthermore, The Deaf Village is a democratic forum and that allows people to vote for such things as who the Moderators are. Such ballots are entirely secret, but the system ensures that one person only ever gets one vote.

Why does it make the site easier to use?

Because the system can tell who is who (by checking your Screen Name and your password) it can make sure that your posts are correctly marked, that you have your very own personal settings, and we can make useful things like E-Mail easy to use too. The village will even show you who else is logged on to the system. Neat, huh?

How to Register

To register, you need to go to The Village log-in page and enter some registration details. Here's a picture of the sort of thing you might enter. [Picture on the Registration details]

Your details will be different, of course, but this shows typical values.

Let's assume that a user named Fred Bloggs has decided he wants to register with the site, and so he's typed his name in the Login name box. Fred is being particularly wise here as he has chosen to keep his login name nice and simple, he's using just his first name and he's using all lower-case letters. This way his log-in name is both easy to remember, and easy to type in without making mistakes.

Next, for the Screen name box he has to enter a name that he wants all the other Villagers to know him by. It's like a nick-name. In this case, Fred has chosen "MrBlueSky" to be his screen name. You can choose almost anything you like for your screen name, providing someone else hasn't chosen it already, of course.

Fred's E-mail address is next. He'll have to be careful when typing this - if he gets it wrong, the system won't be able to send him any messages, and he won't receive his confirmation e-mail!

He now has to choose a Password. It can be anything he likes, but it's a good idea to keep it memorable, and it's really important that he doesn't tell anyone else what it is. The password can contain a mix of letters and numbers, but it must be six or more characters long. As you can see from the picture, when he types, the password is not even displayed on the screen. Either dots (as in this example) or asterisks will be displayed instead.

Because you can't see what you're doing, we ask you to enter your password again at this point, so we can check that the two entries are the same. Fred does this by repeating his password in the Confirm password box. Again, he needs to take care and type carefully!

When he's done all that, he needs to click on the SUBMIT button, and the system will check that everything is OK. For instance, if someone else has already chosen the Screen name he wants to use, he'll see a message telling him to choose another name. (Sorry Fred, but it's first come, first served!) If his password is too short, or if his Password and his Confirm password don't match, we'll tell him about that too.

The Confirmation E-Mail

Once Fred has completed all the above steps successfully, the system will start to process his registration. Within a few minutes he'll be sent a confirmation E-Mail.

Unfortunately, because this is an automatically generated mail, many mail readers think it is spam - if you have filtering in your mail program you need to look out for this.

Once he receives this e-mail, it will have instructions in it that he should follow closely. Essentially, Fred will need to reply to this E-Mail, making sure that the subject line of the mail contains the special registration code. This is done automatically by most of the popular E-Mail pragrams when you reply to a message, but it's always best to check. Once Fred has done this, and his reply has been sent, he will then have to wait patiently (possibly for a few days, but usually only for a few minutes) for a further E-Mail from the Village. This E-Mail will tell Fred that his Village registration is complete and he may now log in.

Logging in

Back on the Log-in page we finally arrive at the Login details. Here is a picture to show you which part of the screen we are talking about.

Because Fred, our imaginary Villager-to-be, has decided that his Login name will be "fred", that is what he enters in the Login name box. It is important to realise that Login name is case-sensitive. This simply means that upper-case and lower-case letters count as two different things. For example, if Fred tried to use the name "Fred" he wouldn't be allowed in to the site, because his login name doesn't start with a capital "F". Likewise, "FRED", "freD", "FRed" or even "fReD" will not be accepted as his Login name because they use an incorrect mix of upper and lower case letters. He must use fred, as shown, just like he used when registering.

As you might guess, the Password box is just as picky about upper-case and lower-case. He must type his password exactly like he did when he registered.

When he's done that, Fred can decide if he wants the site to remember his login or not. This means that when he visits the site again, he won't need to type his Login name and password again - the system will remember them for him. If he decides that is what he wants to do, Fred will need to tick the box (by clicking on it) next to the Remember this login message. You should only do this if you own the computer you are using, and have complete control over who else can access it.

The system will "forget" his login and password if he tries to login using a different computer, however. This isn't a fault, but a cunning design ploy to ensure that user accountability is preserved. The upshot of this is that if Fred accesses The Village from many different places, he'll be asked to log-in each time he changes computers, and other people will not be able to use his account while he is away from a computer that he used previously.