This article is to be used to help explain how to create accounts. Use this guide to explain to others how to appropriately create accounts and use them.

Creating an account

Accounts can be made fairly easily. Using any live domain, you can append '/new_user' to the url to navigate to the account creation page. An example:

http://www.harddrives.com/new_user

Here, there is a very simple form to fill out. It requires a username, password (and confirmation), a first and last name, phone number, email address, and birthday. Note that validations are in place to ensure that these fields are not empty and, where appropriate, they are well-formatted. Usernames must be unique across the service, which means that submitting this form will fail if the username is already in use.

Owner/Admin Status

Once someone has submitted the form successfully, they are considered a User. In order to make someone an owner, an Admin must enter the username into the owner's account information on the Admin-only Owner list page. Once that information is saved, logging in to the admin_login page will take them to their domain list.

Admins are admitted by the core development team. Email contact can be used to request that someone be made an administrator.

Privilege Levels

There are currently three levels of account privileges:

-User: This is the lowest level an account holder can have. Currently, there are no real benefits to being a simple user. This is implemented so that in the future, features can be enabled that users have access to (like comments).

-Owner: At this level, an account holder is able to view the domains they own. For any domain, they can see who has been changing various aspects of it (History), view parameters of interest (Details), and most importantly, edit the domain. Within the edit page, they have most of the options that an administrator (see below), with the notable exception of changing the owner of the domain. Owners may not delete domains. They may create domains, but the cannot change the owner. They may not look at other owners either.

-Admin: This is currently the highest level of account holder. In addition to all of the abilities of a domain owner, admins can change domain owners (both on the domain creation and edit page), and can edit owner information. They can also alter owner information. Finally, they can delete domains.