| Members Section Overview |
 |
 |
|
Become a Member now, it's free! If you are a registered member this section will give you the information you need to make the most out of our website. If you are not yet a member, then hopefully what you read here will encourage you to join icommunicate so that you to can enjoy all of the benefits. When you become a member, you will gain instant access to the members section, use the interactive messaging system, submit your own articles and resources, and be able to post and answer questions on the Forum. Becoming a member Becoming a member is completely free. It is a simple 2 minute process that will require you to confirm your email address, and fill in some additional information if you wish to register as something other than a general user. Here is a quick link to our registration page. Simply click on this link and it will open up a form for you to enter in your details. Rest assured we will not pass on any of your information to other parties.Benefits of Membership The Forum You do not need to be a member to look at the Forum and get information, help and advice. However, you do need to be a registered member to ask and answer questions on the Forum. A large part of our mission statement is to create an online community that is both committed and helpful. If we can all contribute and share our collective experiences and knowledge, we can all help each other. The experience of living with a communication disorder, whether it is your own or a loved one's, is at times very emotional and distressing. If we as a community can provide help, answers, suggestions and support to those in need when they need it, via this website, we may just be able to make someone’s day a little brighter. What a wonderful thought! Members Area The Members Area is your area. Post your articles, information, stories, and resources here and help us build up a library of useful information that we can all share. Messaging System Using our interactive messaging system, you can make connections with other members with similar interests, build your own groups or networks, chat and email. The icommunity The main reason for the membership scheme is to build a global community of users who can share their knowledge. So please join our site and contribute. None of your information will be passed onto other organizations and we will not irritate you with junk mail. A large focus of this website is to build an online community support network. The aim of this is to enable people that have had similar experiences help guide others through these sometimes deeply traumatic, life changing events. We want to encourage communication on all levels, and would like to see an open and honest dialogue occur between registered users. We are all here to help, and with luck, the users of this site will see the benefits of actively participating in the Forum to help those with questions. We have strict protocols in place to ensure your privacy online whilst still maintaining a high level of connectivity between users. Please check out our Members Terms & Conditions to understand our expectations and protocols. Submitting your articles To your left you will notice a menu box called "User Menu". This is available to professional users only, and means that they are able to submit articles, research and papers for published use on this website. These articles are welcomed with opened arms. There is access to this menu on this page, and on the "Members Profile" page only. Why are there different kinds of icommunicate Memberships? Anyone can become a member of icommunicate, and we would encourage parents abd carers to join as well as healthcare and educational professionals. However, we are aware that there may be people who may claim to be professionals and give misleading advice to others in vulnerable positions. This would be counterproductive to all concerned, and in today's digital age of identity creation, theft and fraud, the last thing we wish to be a part of, is someone else's delusional practices. Hence the need to validate those users wishing to be anything more than a registered user. We hope you can understand our position on this.Selecting your profile type We have set up several different profile types for the purpose of being able to streamline information and resources to specific user groups in the future development of the site. We would like to welcome everyone to our icommunity, and see it as a place where we bring people together to share ideas and information. By defining which group you better fit into, you will help us make the website a more comprehensive experience for all long term. We value your privacy, and your information will remain entirely confidential and not be passed on to any other parties, under any circumstances. For students and professionals, we request some basic information relating to qualifications, but may request more information if at some point in the future if you post information onto the site that we believe may be incorrect, dangerous or controversial. Please see our Registration Policy below. Once you are a registered user you can log in via two different methods. Firstly, there is a simple log in panel in the top right corner of every page. Just enter in your user name and password and you are set to go. Alternatively you can log in via the Log In box that is located on the left, just underneath the menus. If you forget your password or user name simply hit the "Forgot Login" link with the Log In Box to the left and this will be automatically fixed for you. Registration Policy This document has been written to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of our registration process, so that you can make the correct decision about which kind of user you are, and the information required to make this happen.This process was put in place to give benefits to regular users of the site and to build a global community of users who can share information. Registration to this level of the site is FREE and will always be so. We will not pass on any of your information to third parties, but may contact you ourselves occasionally if you have agreed to take part in a research project, or to send you our newsletter. You may opt out of receiving any communications from us at any stage, it just requires that you send us an email via our "contact us" email form on the site, with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line. Why are there different Login Options? We are confident that you will find our site very useful and our online community helpful and sincere. We have divided the login section into different users, not because different users will have access to different resources, but because it will give us invaluable information to help us continue to develop our site to meet the needs of our users. For Student, Healthcare and Educational Professionals User Groups we do not request your professional registration number, but if at some time in the future you were to post certain information onto the site, we may request to verify your qualifications and get clarification of your authenticity as a professional. We do request some additional, specific details regarding your qualifications, although providing this information is not compulsory, and if you do chose to provide us with this information it will be kept totally confidential and would only be used to verify your professional status. This process is in place to give our users a credible, beneficial and positive experience. We must have in place a process to authenticate those professional users of our site. This is for the protection and benefit of both ourselves, our users, and the registered healthcare or educational professionals wishing to use our site. A major goal of our project is to build up a committed community of users that have the ability to freely interact with each other within the site. We wish to actively encourage healthcare and educational professionals to engage and participate with others, offering whatever they can from their experience within their given field. Overall this will create an even larger footprint of help, advice and support. However this always exposes everyone to a slight risk of potentially harmful advice from someone claiming to be someone that they are not. We are realistic here - after all this is the internet! We would like to begin this project in an optimistic frame of mind, hence the reasonably non-invasive registration process for professional users. At this stage of development there is no real advantage of joining a user group as someone that you are not, unless it is purely for self gratifying purposes. We will be actively monitoring forum posts that are of an advisory nature to make sure that posts are constructive and helpful. If we discover misleading or abusive articles on the website or Forum, or the offering of advice that may be dangerous or contrary to the best interests or health of other users who might act on this advice, we will begin a deeper investigation in the details of the User. We only wish to maintain the dignity and integrity of our site, and remedial steps taken will only have an impact on the individual user in question, and their ability to interface with the website. If you do not provide us with this information necessary to authenticate your professional status and then proceed to add information to the site which we feel is contrary, abusive or misleading we may request your professional registration details to verify your status. If this is not forthcoming we can only presume that you are engaging in fraudulent behaviour, therefore voiding your membership and bar you from accessing this site. Some key points to help make your registration process a little quicker and easier. - It is very important that you type your email address in correctly during the registration process, as the system checks on the validity of email address during registration, and it will not continue with the registration of an invalid address to protect our site from spammers. - Likewise we have also installed a new security feature to prevent spammers from misusing our site, and to protect your private information. If you have trouble understanding the letters in the security code you can also hear them by clicking on the speaker symbol to the right of the input field. - Please read the Terms and Conditions as a part of the registration process, so that you are aware of our expectations of user behaviour and contributions to the site, and to our community. - Members Name: The name you create as your USERS NAME will be the name that is displayed on our site. If you do not wish your actual name to be displayed, please create a name that protects your identity. |
