How to tell if you're logged into the forum?

[Mike.Phillips@Autogeek]

How to tell if you're logged into the forum?


We have a lot of new people joining our very active discussion forum all the time and for some, this may be the first time they've joined and interacted on a discussion forum.

If you're new to the world of discussion forums, one of the first things you need to learn is how to tell if you're actually logged-in.

This is important because if you're not logged-in then you cannot,

• Start a new thread
• Reply to an existing thread
• Upload a photo to your photo gallery
• Send a PM
• Reply to a PM
• Sign-up for one of our detailing classes by "replying to a sign-up thread"

So here's a couple of screen-shots that will help you to easily tell if you're logged in.

First, you want to make sure you're on what's called the Forum Homepage, you can do that by clicking the below link which is also the the forum homepage URL

www.AutogeekOnline.net


The Autogeek forum homepage uses what's called CMS software to enable us to arrange information in specific groups. CMS stands for Content Management System. It's a system that enables us to manage the content that's displayed on your browser.

These groups or segments of information are generically referred to as boxes and if you look at each segment you'll notice they are square or rectangular, (like a box), with a border around them giving them a defined shape.

If you look at the forum homepage you can see there are 3 columns of information with two thin columns on each side and one wider column in the middle. In these three columns there are boxes or segmented sections of topical information.

When you're logged into the forum, if you look down just a little ways from the Autogeek Logo in the upper left hand corner, you'll see a box called

User CP

This stands for User Control Panel. If your logged-in then inside this box it will say,

Welcome back >your forum username<


Like this screen shot I took showing that I'm logged-in.





If you're not logged in, or if you're not a member of the forum yet, then it will show two form boxes where a person would type in their Username followed by their Password.

Like this,




That's how you can tell if you're logged in. Over the years I've helped thousands of people to,

• Start or reply to a thread
• Upload a picture and insert it into their message
• Sign-up for a detailing class

And I know from experience that sometimes when a person is new to discussion forums that they can get frustrated when they're having a problem doing any of the above and part of helping them is troubleshooting where the problem is and the first place we need to look is to make sure the member is logged-in.

Some people have their browsers set up to remove all Cookies when they shut down their browser or shut down their computer and sometimes they don't even know they have their browser or computer set-up this way, so again, if they're having a problem doing something on the forum the first thing we need and want to do is to make sure the new member is logged-in.


Hope this helps...