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User Accounts

Email Subscriptions

Website

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User Accounts

Head over to the Register page and follow these steps:

• Enter your email address. If you already receive Grist email newsletters, use the same address here.
• Pick a username. A good way to make sure it's unique is to use your email address again.
• Pick a password. It must be at least 5 characters long.
• Pick a screen name. This is what will be visible to others.
• Fill out the other fields, then hit submit.
• Soon a confirmation email will arrive in your inbox. You must click the link in order to activate your account.

Check and see if the confirmation email went to your spam folder. If it's not there, let us know, and we'll get you set up.

Your account is still there! Unfortunately, we had to reset all the passwords when we moved to the new site. To reclaim your account, follow the instructions for resetting your password.

Whether you've forgotten your username or your password (or both), the procedure is the same. Head over to the forgotten password page and follow these steps:

• Enter the email address associated with your account and hit "Submit."
• Soon you will receive a confirmation email in your inbox. Click the link in the email to confirm that you want to reset your password.
• Soon after, you will receive a second email. This one will contain your username and new password.

Once you're logged in, you can access your profile from any page on the site by clicking on the link on the orange bar at the top that says "Logged in as {your screen name}." There's also a user profile box that will appear on every page on the site after you log in; look for it on the upper right-hand side of the page. Once you access your profile page, you can update your information and change your preferences using the links in the right column.

From your profile page, click on the link under "Edit Profile" that says "Username and Password." Enter your new password in the two fields in the Password Change Form, and then enter your current password in the next field down. Hit "Update."

Email Subscriptions

First, log in or register a new profile. Once you're in, click on the "Grist by Email" link in the orange bar at the top. From here, you can check the boxes next to the newsletters you'd like to receive. They will be sent to the email address you used to register your profile.

Most likely, one of two things has occurred. Either Grist newsletters are getting caught in a spam filter, or your address has "bounced," meaning your email server rejected the newsletter we sent, for whatever reason. The more common of these two scenarios is the spam filter. Check to see if Grist messages are in your junk folder. Then make sure Grist is "whitelisted" so that the spam filter knows email from Grist is OK. See the next question for specific ways to do this.

If it's not a spam filter issue, your email server may be rejecting messages from Grist outright. Try re-subscribing to the newsletter(s) you were receiving. If you don't receive the subscription confirmation email in your inbox, we recommend contacting the tech support for your email provider and asking them if they can determine what's happening to incoming emails from Grist. If you're still having problems, let us know, and we'll do our best to find a solution.

The simplest way to "whitelist" Grist with your spam filter is to add us to your contact list/address book. The email address you need to add is grist@grist.org.

Yahoo!

• Click "Contacts" in the left column
• Click "Add Contact"
• Type grist@grist.org into the "Email" field
• Click "Save"
*this will also allow you to automatically load images in Grist emails

Hotmail

• Click "Options"
• Under "Junk email," click "Safe and blocked senders"
• Click "Safe senders"
• Add grist.org to the list

Or

• Click "Contacts" in the left column
• Click "New"
• Type grist@grist.org into the "Personal e-mail" field
• Click "Save"

AOL
Read this for detailed instructions, or try one of the methods below:

• Send a message to grist@grist.org. It should get automatically added to your address book

Or

• Open your Address Book
• Click "Add"
• Type grist@grist.org into the "Email" field
• Click "Save"

Note: Grist has experienced problems delivering messages to AOL addresses. If you have another address at a different domain, we recommend subscribing with it instead.

Gmail

• Click "Contacts" in the left column
• Click "Create Contact"
• Type grist@grist.org into the "Primary Email" field
• Click "Save"

For other email clients, we recommend one or more of the following:

• Add grist@grist.org to your contact list/address book
• Check your preferences/options/account settings for "allowed senders," "whitelist," etc., and add Grist where appropriate
• Set up a filter that will automatically send incoming mail from grist@grist.org to your inbox (or other mail folder)

Website

First, log in or register a new profile. Once you're in, the comment form is down beneath the article and any comments people have already posted.

Yes! You can edit a comment for up to one hour after you post the comment. In general, we encourage you to read through the preview of your comment closely before you post it the first time!

When you are reading comments on a Grist article, you can choose to "ignore" a commenter. This means that comments from that person will not show up on your screen when you are reading Grist. You need to be logged in for this feature to work, and the ignore function will not block a commenter's response to another commenter; you'll still see those conversations. Also, you can stop ignoring a commenter just as easily as you can start. Just go to your profile page and look for the box labeled "commenters I'm ignoring." Click the commenter you want to start reading again and remove him or her from your ignore list.

When you are reading comments on a Grist article, you can opt to view comments as "flat." This will turn off the indentation of comments that are responses to previous comments. Instead, you'll get a purely chronological listing of comments. Some readers may prefer the threaded view, as it makes it clear when a particular comment is a response to another commenter, not necessarily to the article the comments are appearing on.

When you are reading an article on Grist, you will notice the "add as favorite" link under the author's byline. By flagging an author as a favorite, you will add a box to your public Grist profile page listing your favorites. This is a way for you to show other Grist readers what you like best on the site, and it's a handy, one-click doorway to your favorite authors' archive pages.