User documentation for the Trust-forum corrected version of July 7, 2005.

Version francaise

Registration

Only the fields of login and pass are required.
In prevention for the case you will forget your password, there are two possible tricks you can prepare during registration and that will be involved when you will click on "forget password" mentioning your pseudo: writing your email will let then the password be mailed back to you; if you enter something in "Secret question / secret answer", the secret question will be displayed, and you type then the correct secret answer that you entered in registration, the password will be displayed.
Both tricks are optional; so you can even use none, letting blank the fields "email" and "secret question/ secret answer", but then you must remember well your password !

Languages

This system is multi-language, so you can add your own translation of the interface, then your translation will be available to other users. But you need not bother doing it now because it may be lost at the next update of the system.

What are my pseudos ?

As a user of this service, you have one login but you can have different pseudos to present yourself to the public. Your login is your first pseudo, then the other pseudos you create for yourself are not valid for logging in. So you enter the system always by the same login and pass, to do whatever you want under any of your pseudos.
The information of which pseudos are yours is secretly stored in the server; the administrator of the server can access it but he should not reveal it to the public.
Each time you will access from your account a remote server of this network of peer sites, you will choose (or the system takes according to the situation) under what pseudo you will be authentified there.

How to use this system for private correspondance, as a replacement for email ?

1) How to communicate with people that are not members of this network, or invite them to register

(It was in plans to have a full webmail to correspond with outside people by email, but since the opening of a mailbox requires to access some Unix functions that are not in the standard PHP language, we could not do it yet, but the following other ways should be good).
There is already the possibility to send emails to the outside, but neither store nor receive. Here is how: go to Contact list, then "Add email to contact list". After email address you can enter a comment for yourself, to appear with this email in your contact list. Then, click on this email address appeared in the contacts table. You access a form to write the message to send to this email.

Above is a checkbox "would you like to add invitation?" which is one of both ways by which a user can invite a new person to register, once the registration will be closed from uninvited visitors. So if you check this box, on the below of your message will be added a link with an authentication code by which this person can access registration form.

The other way to invite a new user, for the case he is here with you, is from inside your account using the link "register new" in contact list.

This invitations system for registration, will be useful to prevent spam by not inviting spammers. Indeed, what will prevent spammers from being invited will be the fact that the information of who invites who is secretly stored: if someone invited a spammer to use this system, he would be detected as such and be held responsible for the problem. The problem would be analysed by the administrator and discussed with the people involved in order to find the solution, that may involve reducing the functionalities (invitations by him would be blocked) or even his account may be blocked or deleted.

But it is now possible to correspond with unregistered people who only have an email, as if they were registered, as described below.

2) Communications with other members of this network

Knowing an identity (pseudo) of your friend, you can start a correspondance with him by opening a new private forum. For this, first click on "Create forum". Then, fill the name (title) of your forum.
Choose the forum type:
- Private: only invited users that appear in this forum's invitation table can read it
- Semipublic : all users of this network can read it, but only invited users can write in it
- Public : all users of this network can write in it.
Then, choose in which of your folders you will see it (this can be modified later).

The comment (a few words) will be displayed on top of the forum when one visits it, and the comment2, that can be longer (a few lines), will only appear when one visits the forum info page.
When you create a private forum, at first you are the only person that can access this forum. So you can post there your first message, store it and reedit it later. But for this to be addressed to someone, you must invite this person to this forum (give access right). Invitations can be made from the info page of the forum, so for this you first need to follow the link "info page" in order to make invitations.
There are three levels of access rights to a forum: read, write and admin. Each of these rights is stronger than the previous rights and includes them. Any user with an access right to a forum can invite another user to access it at most with the same level of right, from the info page of the forum. So if you click on "Read", you will only give this person access to read the forum; if you click "Write", you will give access to read and write; if you click "Admin", this will give the right to read, write and admin.

There is somehow a forth level of right after the admin right, though it does not appear here: the owner right. The owner is unique, and can abandon his owner right by giving it to another admin.

An admin in a forum can deny a right of a non-admin, letting him to an effective level lower than the level where he was invitated. Only the owner can deny the right of an admin.
For most practical purposes of private correspondance you can simply give a writing access to the person you want to correspond with.

It is now also possible to invite an email to a forum. So all forum message that is posted or marked valid (see below) in a forum that has an invited email, will be immediately sent to invited email other than the author, and thus marked as read. This email message has the same format as traditional mailing list, and on bottom is added a link with an authentication code by which this unregistered email user can access this forum and reply in it.

So your correspondance will generally happen by using one same forum. Once the correspondance started, there is no problem to wonder whether he received all you messages since he accesses the same forum as you, except that you should pay attention to the following functionality: to let other people than you read your message, you must validate it ! See explanations below..

Working in network

By these features, you only need to have one account at one site (so, one login and pass) to be identified everywhere. For this, you must first always log in at the same site called "your home site", with the same (login, pass). Then, once logged in, you can visit other sites of this network of independent sites sharing the same protocol, under an identity of the form mypseudo@mysite where you replace "mysite" by your home site, and "mypseudo" is a pseudo of yours that you choose to use here. For more details, see "global login system" in the project page.

This networking aspect has been integrated with our folders and forums system, so that forums of any type (from public to private) can be accessed by users of this network whatever their home site is, and remote forums will appear in your folders. The only restriction is that forum creation is reserved for local users, so you can create forum only at your home site, and any forum is hosted at the home site of its creator.

In the "Bookmarks" page of your account, you can see what are your open sessions in remote sites.

At this time we did not develop the possibility for you to have several identities that seem to come from different sites; however, as thousands of users can have the same home site, the anonimity given this way can be already satisfying in many cases.

Save, preview, post, Mark valid!

By this forums system, you can write some message and save it to the forum, though you did not finish it or are not sure you really want it to be read by your friend. We say it is an invalid message of the forum. This can be done in 2 ways: Save, or Preview. In both cases, you see again the thread including the new message, that only you can read. This way you can read it again and verify that it is OK, and choose to edit it again as many times as you want before letting others read it, or possibly deleting it.
When you are finished and want others to see it, you can either save it using "Post" button (for the last edit) or click on "Mark valid!" to validate the message that is already saved. But still, if after clicking it you change your mind and want to edit it again or delete it, it may not be too late, provided that your friend did not already read it of course. So if it is not too late, you can click on "Mark invalid" to invalidate your message and come back to the previous situation. But as soon as your friend will have read your message that you have let valid, you cannot do it anymore, in order to not confuse your friend after he could once see message (as usually one cares to read a message only once and base further conversations on its first read, without trying to modify the past !).

So, the next time you access this forum, if you still see "Mark invalid" it means this message is still waiting for being first read by somebody other than you and you can invalidate it; but if you see no more link there, you know your message has been read.

Subscribing to a forum

If you don't want to always directly see a private forum in your mainbox, you can move it to any subfolder of your mainbox. Then, being subscribed to this forum will let it also appear in your mainbox every time another user wrote a new message since the last time you accessed it. If you unsubscribe, it will then only appear in the subfolder where you put it.
When you invite a person to a forum, this will subscribe this person to this forum (until he decides to unsubscribe).

Dating system

The draft of a dating system that has been done previously, has been dropped for now, and a more correct version will be reintegrated in the futre.

The parameters in the dating system are not all right, so it cannot seriously be used yet, but only as a beta test; you can discuss, inside this system at trust-forum.php.by, the list of parameters in order to help making good ones. For example: what list of possible interests/hobbies should there be ?

The idea of this system is: for each question, the user sets the value of his personal situation, and, for each possible value of the situation of the other person to consider matching with, a badness number is put. If the total badness of a profile does not exceed 40 in your criteria and conversely, it will be considered as a possible match, so you will have the chance to review and select it.
When your parameters, search criteria and photo are ready:
if you are not sure your photo is good, you can ask other users for advice about it.
Then, you can activate your account to receive matches by users who will send their accounts, and send your account to be reviewed by other users with an already active dating account.
The match that you selected and that selected you will appear in your Selected folder.

Each match (=pair of users (x,y) such that the parameters of the one have no more than 40 badness for the other and conversely), has a status made of the data (status that x gives to y, status that y gives to x), with possible values: unreviewed (to appear in the new matches list); trashed (=eliminated by user); delayed (=not decided yet); selected; selected+. If you don't know yet, you can "delay" to decide later, but you can as well "select" the profile so the other can choose to select or trash your profile from his/her list. If you are trashed, the match will disappear from your list so your wondering ends.

Future developments

Last and next modifications plans are described here.
Back to the description of the project