Why create an account and log in to post?

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Sometimes you can participate without creating an account and logging in, but creating an account is free and we promise that we will never under any circumstances give out or sell your email address. If you want other readers to know your address, include your address in your post or signature, otherwise it will not be visible.

N.B. There are times when you must be logged in to post. This is the case when the site is getting a lot of spam posts. Forcing posters to use a real email address helps to discourage spammers. Again, please be reassured that your email address will never be divulged to anyone (unless you keep sending ads about viagra, links to sick porn sites, and other pure spam posts that are completely unrelated to Taken In Hand, in which case we might report you to your ISP if you do not desist when asked to do so).

Logging in enables you to see at a glance what posts (comments) you have not yet seen, via a “new comments” link which will appear in the sidebar on the left when you have logged in. Here is a snapshot of a typical “new comments” page, to give you a better idea of what this means. This is useful because people often comment on articles which are no longer on the front page, and unless you check the “new comments” page, you are likely to miss those posts.

The benefit to us is that this facilitates the discussions.

Secondly, logging in allows all your posts to appear in the fully searchable database as attributed to you.

Finally, you can create a standard signature with your name, email address if desired, and web site if you like. If you don't want to give out your email address, don't put it in your signature, but if your fear is that your email address will then get spammed, note that all email addresses on this site automatically have the “-at-” replaced by a picture of an “-at-” sign, so unless you think that the bots will be clever enough to replace the picture with the real “-at-”, you can safely put your email address on this site. Another way to give your email address relatively safely is to write it in a way that a human can translate but a machine might not be able to, such as this made-up address for the purpose of illustration:

yourusernamehere - the at sign here - yourdomainnamehere - the dot here - and com here

For example, you might write:

webmaster - put an at sign here - takeninhand - the dot here - the com here

for:

webmaster-at-takeninhand.com

2003 Sep 22 - 10:14 | latest article | previous article | next article |