Frequently Asked Questions

Running events. An organization sets up an event, describes it, says where and when it happens, lists what people can register for - registration, clinics, tours, meals, merchandise, memberships - and publishes a page about it. Several organizations can share the site, each with its own events, its own people and its own look.

Not to read a published event page: those can be opened by anybody with the link. You need an account to work on an event - to add items, venues, presenters or content - and organizations decide who that is.

Register in the menu creates one. You choose a user name and a password and give your name and email address; if the name you want is taken, the form suggests a free one rather than simply refusing. Somebody an organization adds as a presenter may have an account created for them, in which case use Forgot your user name or password? on the login page to set a password and get in.

• Between 8 and 25 characters long
• At least one upper case letter (A-Z)
• At least one lower case letter (a-z)
• At least one special character, such as ! ? # $ % & * @
• No spaces
• Not one of your last 6 passwords

The list is shown on every form that sets a password, and the last rule is why an old favourite is sometimes refused: the site remembers your last 6.

Both are on the login page, under Forgot your user name or password? For a user name, give the email address on the account and it is sent there. For a password, give the user name and a link to set a new one is sent to the address the account holds - never to an address typed into the form.

Either way the site answers the same whether or not the address or name is registered. That is deliberate: the page must not become a way of finding out who has an account.

Because saying which half was wrong would tell somebody guessing that the user name exists. After 4 failed attempts in a row the account is locked and an administrator has to release it, so a wrong password is worth being careful about.

Sign-in is allowed only from network addresses this installation recognises. If you are somewhere new - a different office, a hotel, a phone's connection - your address may not be on that list, and the attempt is refused and the account locked whether or not the password was right. Ask an administrator to add the address.

The person icon in the top right corner opens your own profile. Your name, address, telephone numbers and email address are there, and so is Change Password, which asks for the current one before it will set a new one.

A six-digit code emailed to you each time you log in, as well as your password. You are asked for one when an organization you belong to has turned it on - it is the organization's decision, not yours, and it applies to everybody in it. The password is always still required: the code is as well as it, never instead of it.

Only your email. Nothing is installed or set up: after your password is accepted, a code is sent to the email address on your profile. It works for 10 minutes, once. If it doesn't arrive, check your junk mail folder, or press Send a New Code - the old one stops working.

An administrator can clear the setting from your profile. You then set an app up again the next time you log in.

Choosing which organization you are working in. It changes what the pages show you, the name in the header, and the colors - each organization can have its own theme - and the site remembers your choice between visits.

An organization that sits under another one.

The theme belongs to the organization rather than to you, and is set on its profile; Preview Themes there shows one without saving it. What is yours is your browser's own light or dark setting, which the site follows.

• Basic Information - the title, tag line and description, its type and status, the tax rates, who takes the card payments, the home page editor, and the public address to hand out.
• Event Users - who may work on this event and what each may do.
• Policies - the refund, cancellation and payment wording.
• Venues - the hotels and halls, and which of their rooms are used.
• Item Settings - the groups items fall into, and the extra fields each group's items carry.
• Schedule & Calendar - for a business or non-profit event, one day at a time from 6:00 AM to midnight, with a column for each room. Its items are dragged on at the time they start, as often as each is held, and one on it can be copied, once, to every room free at that time that day. For any other event, its days, a week at a time.
• Owners And Presenters - the people and clubs who present items, with their photographs.

The tabs after those are one per item group, each in its own color.

Write it in the home page editor on the first tab, then hand out the Public Page Address from the box above it. Click the box to select the whole address, then copy it. It carries the event's scrambled id and a token saying the link came from here; without both, the address shows nothing at all.

Preview Home Page opens the page in a new tab so you can read it before anybody else does.

Placeholders that fill themselves in. The editor's dropdowns offer them by group - the event's title and dates, the organization's name and address, today's date - and what you insert looks like {{Events.EventTitle}} until the page is shown, when it becomes the real thing. It means a page written once keeps up with the event it describes.

One of them, Events.GoogleMapForLocation, becomes the venue's address linked to Google Maps. Another, Events.PrimaryVenueMap, shows the primary venue on a map, with its address linked underneath; an email shows the linked address alone, because mail programs do not show maps.

It opens on the week the event starts in - the month of its earliest date - because that is the week somebody looking at an event usually wants. The arrows move a week at a time, and Back to the first week returns.

An Item setting is a group - Registration, Clinics, Lunch, Merchandise - and an Item is one thing inside it. The group decides what its Items carry: whether they have a cost, a presenter, photographs, handouts or extra fields of their own, and whether somebody has to be registered or a member to take one.

Because the item's details already price it. Some items cost whatever the attendee chooses - a dinner costs whatever the entrée costs - and some carry a price on their own detail row. Where either is true, the box on the item is held at 0.00 and says so, because a cost in both places would be charged twice.

Extra fields that only make sense for one kind of item. A home layout tour needs a scale, an era and a mainline length; a dinner needs an entrée; a lunch needs neither. Each group names its own, so the same underlying slots read as whatever that group calls them.

The Item Settings tab drills down: the group in hand, then its detail fields, and clicking one of those shows its options and the values items hold in it.

The group's own color, chosen with the little color box on its form. It is what its tab is written in, so a long row of groups can be told apart at a glance.

The ? icon at the top left of the page. It explains that page in particular, and is written by the people who run the site.

Contact Us in the menu. You can attach files to the message, and it reaches the people who run the site rather than a mailbox nobody reads.

The Privacy Policy says exactly what is collected and why, and the Terms of Use are the terms everybody using the site agrees to.

Necessary ones, which make signing in work and cannot be turned off, and performance ones, which are your choice. Targeting cookies are permanently off and cannot be switched on: nothing here is sold or passed to anybody for advertising. The banner you saw on your first visit is where the choice is made, and the privacy policy links back to it.

Yes. Everything that can be clicked can be reached by tabbing to it and pressed with the space bar or the return key, every page starts with a link that skips the menu, the headings run in order so a screen reader can move between them, and the colors are chosen to stay readable in both light and dark settings.