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Registration
Registration requires your full name, email address, date of birth, gender and email address. To begin please enter in your full name separated with spaces and capitalised. This will become your user name and will be unable to be changed. Next enter in your email address and then select your date of birth by using the drop down menus from left to right; date, month year. Please select your gender from the drop down list and enter in your password ensuring that you have typed it correctly. Once this is done you may press the registration button. If your details were correct you will be logged in immediately. However you will be notified of an error if your user name has already been taken or you did not submit a user name, email address or password.
Viewing and Editing Your Profile
To view your profile click on the large right most navigation button on the header of the website entitled “Profile”. This web page is your profile and will display your name, status, profile picture, general information, problems and wall posts that your friends have posted on your profile.
To edit your profile click on the link underneath your profile picture that is entitled “Edit My Profile”. This will take you to a page that will let you change your general information (the main text of your profile), your status (displayed under your profile picture), upload a new profile picture or change your password.
Finding and Befriending Others
To find a person who is a member of Athena Answers you can use the search bar located at the top right of the website. Type in their first or last name and you will be shown a list of results matched as closely to your search criteria as possible. Next to each name is the option to request their friendship. Alternatively you can click on their name which will take you to their user profile. From here you can click the link to request their friendship.
Friendship requests will appear as a notification on a users’ home page underneath their profile picture. Clicking on this notification will list all people wanting to befriend you. Next to each name are two buttons which will let you accept or deny the friendship. Accepting the friendship will let both people see and post to each others profiles and help with their private problems.
Submitting a problem or personal dispute
To create a new problem you must click on the navigation button entitled “New Problem”. On this page you will find the necessary form to create a problem and a link at the top right of the problem to list a dispute if this is what you want to do instead.
Submitting a new Problem; the first part of this process is checking if this problem already exists unless you are certain your problem is unique or only relavent to you. The first box on the form is the search box. Using this box will open a new popup window to allow you to quickly glance at problems that most closely match your search criteria. After this it is recommended to close this window or tab and continue using your original one if you decide to go forward with submitting the problem or not. Next please select if you want this problem to be viewable by anyone or only your friends. Select an appropriate category for this problem and then enter in a short title and futher description below. The next text area is optional and should only be entered in to if you have a solution in mind for this problem already but you are not sure if it is correct. Once the problem is created you or anyone else capable of viewing this problem may submit further suggested solutions at any time.
Submitting a Dispute; this involves once more selecting who may view, the category and title but this time you are encouraged to put most of the detail of your problem in to the your side of the story box of this dispute. This story is required and will be created as a solution attached to this problem. Next is a box to list who the dispute is with. You must accurately list their user name here. Opening your list of friends or performing a user search in a new window may help you with this. Once you have specified a person you have the option of creating the dispute with just the two of you or adding additional people. You may add as many additional people as you like until you decide to create this dispute. All people listed in this dispute will be notified and every one of them will be required to submit their perspective and side of the story, also created as a solution, which will be attached to this problem. Once everyone has had their say this problem is open for viewing to start to be solved.
Solving and Participating with Problems or Disputes
Once you are looking at a problem page you are provided the following information: the title of the problem, the person who submitted it (their picture and user name is found at the left), if it is a dispute or normal problem, how many times it has been viewed, its current status, category visibility settings and finally a list of suggested solutions so far in descending order of votes so far with the soluition submitter information at the left. If it is a normal problem a description will be displayed. If it is a dispute a list of those within the dispute will be shown instead and if the problem is open to be solved every person in the dispute will have submitted their perspective as a solution at this time.
If the status of the problem or dispute is “Unsolved” then you may vote for a solution that you belive to be correct. You may switch your vote to a different solution at any time. If you can not see a solution that you believe to be correct and you think you have a better one there is a link at the bottom of the page to suggest your own solution. This solution will also have your name attached to it and be able to be voted for to help find the best idea or perspective to sole the problem or dispute at hand.
If you are the original submitter of the problem and more than one week has passed since you submitted the problem several options will appear to let you solve the problem in a finalised way. If it is a normal problem a button will appear on each solution to let you pick which solution helped you the most or was the actual solution regardless of votes. The votes here act mostly as a guide and a way to show you popular opinion on what everyone who contributed believed to be the right answer. After you have picked this solution the status of the problem will change to “Solved” with your picked solution displayed now underneath your problem description clearly marked as the solution.
When it comes to the time to solve a dispute however just one button will appear. Upon clicking this button all the votes will be counted and if there is a solution which clearly has more votes than any other this will be declared the winning solution to this dispute regardless of if the submitter was originally listed in the dispute or not. Again the status of dispute will change and the winning person and or perspective contained within a solution will be displayed at the top.
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