Thanks for taking the time to learn about how our website works.
The DC H2O website was designed to put our community first. Everyone in our area with herpes and/or HPV can benefit from our published resources (calendar, message board, outside links to other groups and personal support). At the same time, anyone with our “gift” can become a site member—enjoying all the built-in advantages—and help our group by attending and hosting social events.
The information on this page should explain everything… at least as far as “everything” applies to our website. If you have any questions about this website’s operation, please feel free to
If you just want to learn more about our group, the events we host, or are looking for other resources on the web, there’s no reason to register with our website. We make our events calendar, message board and all “helpful” information available to the public.
BUT! Registering with our website does have its advantages. Just keep reading to learn more.
THIS SITE DOES NOT USE ANY SECURE CONNECTIONS.
Because of that—and for your own protection—when you sign up as a member, you should use a password that is easy for you to remember, but one that you DO NOT use for any other website or Internet account. When you sign up, your password is stored on this website in an encrypted format (not even the site admin can figure it out), but it will travel over a non-secure (clear-text) connection.
Please understand that the security of your personal information is ultimately up to you. We have done everything possible to protect your privacy, including:
- Implementing a “robots.txt” file to keep most (but not all) search engines from archiving everything (message board, calendar, user info, etc.) except the main page.
- Encoding your email address if/when it’s displayed… to combat spam-bots, which commonly scour websites for email addresses to add to their growing spam lists.
- Encrypting passwords on the server to protect you from hackers.
- Building in various sanity-checks to make sure that another DC H2O member can’t mess with your account.
- H2O of DC will never ever ever provide any user information to any person, company, entity, whatever.
When you create your user account on the website, you will be asked to provide a name (screen names and/or aliases are allowed), an email address (which will be validated), and a password.
As a logged-in site member, you will be able to:
- Change your user name, email and password as you find necessary.
- If you ever forget your password, you can easily reset it to gain access to your account info.
- Sign up for, and customize, calendar notification emails.
- Add your instant messaging information, if you choose.
- View the contact details of other members in the member directory.
- Delete your account at any time.
Even if you don’t have an account on the website, you can always check out our calendar for upcoming social events. If you have an aggregator, we also offer the events calendar as an RSS feed.
Member Benefits: As a logged-in site member, you can:
- Sign up for and customize calendar email notifications.
- Manage your own DC H2O events; add/change/delete your event information whenever you like. No more relying upon “Calendar Administrators” to do your dirty work.
- All of your event(s) info is saved on the server. You can easily create a recurring event by simply changing the date of that past event.
- Even cooler: Changing the date or time of any event will mark it for email notification. It’s auto-magic!
Anybody (registered or not) can view public posts and post their own messages to our online Message Board.
Member Benefits: As a logged-in site member, you can:
- Edit and/or delete any of your messages. Now, you won’t have to double-post to correct any mistakes… just change the original post with the mistake.
- Make any of your posts “private”. Private posts can only be viewed by other members who are logged in, but are hidden from people who are not logged in or do not have an account. This is a good way to make “psst… heads up” posts to other friends without exposing new-comers to some of the clique-ish behavior and inside jokes that may turn them away from our group.
- Ignore any other registered user. If someone (a registered user) regularly posts messages that you find annoying, you can choose to simply ignore them. The message board will drop in a placeholder for their posts, but will not display any of the content.
- Un-ignore anybody on your “Ignore List”. Each ignored placeholder provides a link to your account preferences where you can un-ignore somebody that you’ve previously “put on mute”.
- Vote offensive messages off the board. Any message that you find offensive (whether posted by an anonymous or registered user), simply click the little stop sign icon on that post. This will count your vote to delete the post from the board (you can only vote once). After a certain number of people have voted to remove the post, the system will automatically delete it. Everyone gets to contribute to the maintenance of the website.