The primary purpose of this web site is to foster the community of volunteers who work on these significant Natural Areas in San Francisco. To participate online, just as you participate in the field, you need to create an identity here by signing up and logging in. If you only are interested in watching anonymously, you can view most of the content here without doing either and you can skip the rest of the information here.

However if you do want to participate in this community, please read the following information carefully so you can figure out how to participate!

Signing Up

If you have never signed up here before, click the Signup link in the upper right corner of any page. This will bring up a form that asks for

• your email address
• a “display name” that will show with any content you add to the site
• a password (and a confirmation field)

You must provide a valid email address that you can access, as our server will send to it an email with an activation code in a link that you must click. This will return you to the SF Natural Areas web site to complete your signup. This step is essential since we don’t want any signups with invalid email addresses that bounce.

If you can’t find this activation email, then perhaps your ISP or your email client has junked it as spam. Look around to find this email if it’s not in your inbox, because we will definitely have sent it. If you can’t receive email from us, then you won’t really be able to participate in this community

Logging In

Once you’ve signed up and activated your “account” as above, you will be logged into our site. You can tell that you’re logged in if your name is visible in the upper right corner.

If you go to another computer, or if you clear your browser cookies, or if it’s been a fairly long time since you last logged in — and you don’t see your name in the upper right corner — you will need to login. Click the Login link where your name should be. This will bring up a form that asks for

• your email address
• your password

Note that this must be the same email address that you used when you signed up. We can’t read minds personally, nor can our server, so if you have several email addresses, we can’t guess which one is the correct one for you.

If you enter your correct email address and password, you’ll be returned to the main page of our site and you’ll see your name in the upper right corner.

If our server tells you that you’ve entered an invalid email/password pair, then one of a couple things may have happened:

• You may have entered the correct email address but forgotten your password.
• You may have entered the wrong email address.

The former case is easy. Simply click the “Reset Password” link by the Login button. This will open a form below the login form called “Reset Password” with instructions for you to enter your email address and then click the “Email Me the Link” button. This will cause our server to send to your email address a new “activation” email with a special link that you click to get into your “account.” Once there, you should reset your password to something you can remember.

The latter case is harder. If you can’t remember your email address, then our system can’t email you a new activation email. You should email us and we’ll try to help you.

NOTE: If you once logged in but now cannot, or if you want to change your email address, you should not signup as a new user. You should handle login problems as above, and you should handle email address changes as below. But just as you would never go into a bank and open a new account because you can’t remember your PIN at the ATM, you should not signup as a new user simply because you can’t login again!

Logging In When You Forget Your Password

What if you know you have a sign-in here but you know you don’t know your password? You presumably haven’t even tried to login nor have you read the above section. We’ll repeat the instructions here as they bear emphasis:

• Do not signup as a new user!
• Go to the login page.
• Click the “Reset Password” link by the Login button.
• Enter your email address into the form called “Reset Password” you see below the login form.
• Click the “Email Me the Link” button.
• Check your email for the new “activation” email with a special link that you click to get into your account.
• Click the link in that activation email to return to our site, where you will now be logged in.
• Go to your Set Preferences page and update your password to something you can remember.
• Have your browser remember your login and password for our site if it can do so. (Firefox can, and you really shouldn’t be using anything else.)

When all else fails, email us for help before randomly signing up again.

Resetting Your Password and Email Address

If you are logged in — you can see your name in the upper right corner — you can edit your profile at our site. Click the “Your Name Preferences” link. This will bring up a page with information about you such as when you registered and how many photos and tags you’ve contributed. In the “Actions” section you’ll see an “Edit Preferences and Profile” link. This will bring up two forms.

• The “Login Settings” form allows you to enter a new email address and to change your password. This email address will subsequently be where our system sends you email reminders (if you request them) about events, and it is also the address you will need to use to login.

• The “Site Profile” form allows you to change the name that is displayed with any content you add, to specify your skill level in habitat restoration work (“novice” or “experienced”) and to set your preferred time zone (default is Pacific; this option really isn’t important for this site but what the heck).

Each form has its own submit button, which will update your information in our system. This should all be pretty obvious.

Signing Up For Event Notifications

In the “Signup” section in the left column of the page, you will always see an “update your notifications” link. This will bring up a page listing all the sites in our system, divided into those where you’ve signed up for emails and those where you’ve not. Click the “add site” and “drop site” links by each site to set them as you wish.

Note that when you visit the pages of any specific site, you will see in this same upper left column area a reminder as to how you’ve set your email preferences for the site.

If you signup for email notifications, all that you will get are

• emails generated from event managers about their events
• emails from site administrators about general issues — political or technological

Regular members of the site who don’t have administrative Superpowers cannot use the site to spam other members. We don’t expose any email addresses in any fashion that web bots can use to harvest email addresses. We will not use email addresses for any purpose other than topical messages about our San Francisco Natural Areas.

RSVPing for Events

In order to plan the habitat restoration events, it’s important to know how many people are going to participate in order to insure the proper amount of gear, water, and snacks are provided. Also, we need to match the size of the volunteer group to the tasks to be accomplished. Hence this RSVP system.

Each event has a specified “size limit” set by the event manager (in nearly all cases, a staff person in the SFRPD Natural Areas Program). Until the event is fully booked, you will see when you click on an event (either from the Events Calendar or the upcoming events listed in the left column of each page) “Yes”, “Maybe”, and “No” buttons in addition to other information about the event. Click one of these buttons to tell us your plans. Once an event is fully booked, you will no longer see these buttons unless you’ve already replied “Yes” or “Maybe” in which case there will be a “No” button so you can cancel.

In addition, when an event leader sends out a reminder email, it will include at the end of the email “Yes”, “Maybe”, and “No” links. Click on one of these links to launch your browser, come to our site, and register your plans. RSVPing is really that simple.

Event leaders see additional information on each event’s page that tells them how many people have responded each of these ways, so right before heading out to the field, a leader should make a final check to see whom to expect.

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