Overview Page 

Help on Editing your Account Information

This screen provides you with the ability to maintain your personal information and membership selections.  There is quite a bit of information to go through but a lot of it is important only if you plan to be listed in the public directory.  When you are listed you should take the time to thoroughly fill out the entire form.  

Getting Started

There are several sections so be sure to go through each section and enter your information or make your selections.  Those items that are required are marked with a "*" and you will not be able to submit the form unless they have been entered.

This form has a feature where important fields are checked on the server immediately for correctness.  This helps to ensure that when you do click "Submit" it will succeed.  When you have finished with a checked field and click on another box, the test is performed and if your input is not correct, both the label and the field will be highlighted in a bright red to indicate that this field still needs your attention.  You cannot submit the form as long as you have fields highlighted this way.

We will cover the Edit Account page in sections starting at the top.  The sections are Personal Information , Group Membership , Directory Publish Status , Miscellaneous Info , and Member Attributes .  You may notice that some sections have a help link of their own - use it to get in-depth help on that section.  When finished click "Submit" at the bottom of the form to save your changes on the website. 

Personal Information

Personal information covers the four field sets at the top named Login Info, Name Info, Address Info, and Phone Info.  This information is the core of what is needed to maintain you as a member.  Most of the fields are required and are needed by the organization even if you are not listed in the directory.  Name, address, and phone fields should be pretty obvious but we will talk more about the login set.

Your organization may be configured to use your Username, your e-mail, or either as a login name.  As such the username and e-mail must be unique.  This means that two members (such as a husband/wife team) cannot share the same e-mail address.  If a team absolutely must have a shared e-mail account then they must also share one account on this website.

The password fields are there to modify your existing password.  Leave them blank if you don't want to change the password.  If you do wish to change your password, be sure to enter the new password in both fields.  If you have mis-typed the browser will immediately indicate a problem by turning the "Confirm Password" field red.

Group Membership

The group membership section is used to select which group or groups you belong.  This section has its own help window so go there for detailed help.

As soon as you click on a selection the "Add"  or "Remove" button, whichever is appropriate, will become active.  When you select a sub-group, you are automatically a member of all the higher level or parent groups, which are shown grayed out in the selected group column. You may also be a member of special groups, which only an administrator can change, so these are grayed out in the selected group column.  Selected groups (and their parents) not available for selection are grayed out in the group selection column.

Directory Publish Status 

The directory publish status section sets your choices regarding being listed in the organization's public member directory.  You have a choice to have your name listed or not listed in the online directory.  If you check the "List my name in the online directory" item, you will enable the other sub-items just below.  The sub items allow you to selectively enable the listing of other parts of your personal information set such as mailing address, phone, e-mail, website, and personal web page.

Note: If you have created a personal web page for public viewing, you will need to enable it here or it will not be available.  You may want to leave this unchecked while you are developing your page however.  

Miscellaneous Info 

The miscellaneous section allows you to set account options.  One of these options is to mask your e-mail.  E-mail masking is a method to be able to receive e-mail messages on your personal e-mail account but not actually making your e-mail address public.  Many people wish to hide their e-mail address due to the significant amount of SPAM that can be received when your address has been harvested/sold for spamming.  When checked, site visitors must use the site e-mail dialog to send a message to you and will not know your e-mail address unless you begin a direct e-mail exchange with them.

There may be other organization specific options you can select.  Click on the help ? on the label to find out more about each specific option. 

Member Attributes 

Member attributes are important if you are listed in the directory.  Your organization has created a set of attributes that are significant characteristics of members of that organization.  The attributes are not only visible on the directory listing, but are also searched when the visitor uses the search option for finding members.

There is typically one attribute set that isn't visible on the directory result list but is used during the search.  This keywords set allows you to add additional words a user may type when searching for a person like yourself, including common misspellings of these words.  Use it any time you want to match a given search term but don't want the word listed in your result set.

Click here to see an example of one person's attributes.