If you received an email saying that you are a community events organizer or a related email saying that you’ve received points or a badge for being such, congrats!

This means that you’ve published enough events on our website with the right information and that we know who you are and feel confident enough in the events you contribute that we feel comfortable allowing you to publish your own events — which means that they will go “live” when you publish them without waiting for us to review them.

We still may go in and make edits — in the excerpt, for instance, which we unfortunately cannot seem to get onto our event contribution form.

You do not need to love the points and badges. We think it’s fun but our system does send out emails when points or achievements get generated. To change your preferences on that, you can do so here.

If you subscribed to browser notifications and want to unsubscribe, you can do so using the button above OR find a bell icon in the lower right corner of your screen. The bell icon may be quite tiny until you hover over it. Thus far, we have not been successful with replacing it with a larger icon or resizing it.

If you click on the button above, you’ll be presented with a popup with some options. Most of these apply to getting notifications about membership functions and notices. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to subscribe or unsubscribe members specifically from notifications about articles.

If you log in and want to customize notifications about which types of member notifications you receive through your browser, you can do so by going to your account settings in your profile, where you’ll find a “push notification” option. There, you can opt in to get notifications about groups, requests, invites, etc.

You can also subscribe or unsubscribe to notifications for individual groups by clicking a subscribe button either on the group main page or on the group card in the groups directory.

You’ll find a link to set up two factor authentication in your account settings. You can find that if you go to your user profile and find the dropdown under your avatar. Click “account settings.”

When you click the two-factor-authentication link, you’ll be provided with a QR code or a text and numerical code to do your signup.

Our 2FA uses only the Google Authenticator app.

Follow the instructions to set up 2FA. Make sure to save your emergency codes in case you get locked out as we might not be able to help you with this if you don’t. The email address, here, should be the email address you use for your account on this website.

After you successfully set up 2fa, when you log in, you’ll encounter the 2FA form where you’ll enter the six-digit code provided by the Google Authenticator app. Once you’ve entered six digits, the form should automatically submit and then log you in.

Our membership functions provided facilities for hosting user-created groups, and we like that idea — both to allow members to set up some discussion channels, if they would like, as well as for us to create groups to get content in one space for like-minded members. We’ll see what use we put it to in the future!

For a time, we tried sitewide forums. However, as each group can have its own forum, we felt that hosting sitewide forums as well was confusing.

Any member can create a group by following a button on the Groups page. We ask that you keep it to topics that are “safe for work” and reserve the right to delete groups and block members that violate this policy or create a bunch of unrelated spam groups.

Each group can have its own forum. Member can post updates to the activity page but the group forums can provide a discussion format between members.

Groups may also add media and create albums.

If you have a more specific question about groups and group setup, or how to join a group and don’t see it in our FAQs, click the Ask a Question button on the FAQ page where you most likely accessed this page.

When you are logged in, you’ll find a link to access your user pages in the header of the website (or the mobile menu if you’re using a phone). The URL for your main profile page will be something like https://www.pnwbeyond.com/member/myusername .

From here you can access shop purchases and downloads, delete your account, update your address. You can also, if you choose, update your social media links to share, and can access any posts you’ve written on the website, start or join groups, etc.

If you can log in, please use the tab you’ll find in the “more” dropdown in your user profile where you can access a contact form for concerns or errors. If you are having difficulty with registering or logging in, please visit our contact page and use that form.

If you have a general question that might benefit all users of this website, please ask a question using the “Ask a Question” button either on the FAQ page or from a FAQ tab in your member profile.

If you have an account, you can export your data, manage individual items, or delete your account completely. When you’re logged in, visit your name in the menu, and under that you’ll see a link for “profile and account settings.”

Go there and under account settings, you’ll see options to request a data export or to delete your account.

To delete individual items, you can do that yourself. Please understand that we do not allow members to self-delete or edit some old comment items and forum topics as they may have responses that could render any responses to that comment to be viewed in a different light.

If you have questions about this, please contact us or ask a question using the Ask a Question button on our FAQ page.

Thank you.

At the end of January 2024, we made a few changes to user roles on the website to make it easier to filter out spam registrations. If this is the reason, except for the name of your user role, there should be no change to the capabilities you have if you are a normal user of this website.

From time to time, we change specific user’s roles and capabilities — often it’s to get post authors the “author” or “contributor” role. Other times it may be to allow frequent publishers of events to have more capabilities.

And, unfortunately, sometimes we downgrade a users’ role due to spam or behavior (though this does not happen too often).

We wanted to cut down on spam registrations — but, as we have a shop on our website, we didn’t want to require that we approve each and every registration.

So we have double opt-in required for registration. Which means that, after you register, the website sends you an email with a link to confirm that you actually want to register. You need to click the link to confirm…then you should be able to log in.

Unfortunately, sometimes our email goes to spam. If you were expecting an email from us and did not receive it, the first thing to do is to check your spam folder. If you find a confirmation email from us there, could you please mark it as not being spam? Then click the link to complete your registration.

If you cannot find the email anywhere, you can contact us and tell us the name and email with which you registered and we can resend the confirmation email or enable the registration for you.

If you confirmed your registration but, then, cannot log in, please try doing a password reset. If that doesn’t work, please let us know what error you are encountering.

If you’re getting unwanted messages via our membership system, we’re sorry.

Or if you’re seeing something that is offensive, misleading, or that’s just spam in groups or in member activity or discussion, thank you in advance for reporting it to us.

We cannot be everywhere and do not necessarily get an email every time somebody adds something.

So we’ve implemented a moderation system. If a member is bugging you by sending you private messages, you can block them from the member directory or report them with a flag on their member directory card or on their profile header, which you will see when you hover.

Or if you see a group that should not be there, same thing — there’s a report flag on the group header or the group card. You’ll also find that you can report items in individual activities.

If a member gets enough reports/complaints about an item, they may be auto-suspended for a time based on the nature of the report or complaint.

We reserve the right, ultimately, to block someone who is consistently reported or remove content at our discretion.

If you’ve left a comment as a visitor, you might find that you used to have a crazy monster-looking avatar. Then, maybe, your avatar suddently looked like this (though, somehow, we doubt you’ve noticed):

Now, maybe, it looks like this (or something else if we’ve now set another avatar since we’ve written this):

Or maybe you’ve even logged in and submitted something and find that your avatar looks like the above only a bit darker.

We made the decision, recently, to stop using Gravatars on our website.

Gravatar is a WordPress service that pulls an image that you link with your email. So it’s nice in that it will pull up images set by visitors who leave a comment. But it also means that for each avatar there is, a request is made to secure.gravatar.com — which can impact speed. We have enough going on here that we will speed up things where we can and this was one of those things.

If you’d like to add your own avatar image on this website, you can easily do so if you log in and then go to your user profile. You can find a link in the menu.

When you’re there, hover over or click on your image and you’ll get the chance to upload your own, custom, avatar. You can also hover over the top corner of your cover image to find where you can change that. You can also find links to do so in the profile settings menu.

These are terms and rules for group creation on our website. By creating a group, you agree to these. If you have questions, ask a question on our FAQ page.

Thanks for your interest in creating a group on Pacific Northwest and Beyond. Before you create a group, please observe the following:

Who can create a group?

Group creation is limited to logged-in members who have not been restricted for violating community rules.

What types of groups can I create?

We prefer groups that have something to do with subjects on this website. We do have an “Other” category for groups so we can add some groups to do with things like recipes (if and when we add them) or complaining about WordPress. But the “Other” category is not a free for all and we will limit some groups.

Group Removal

Groups have reporting features and we also usually note when new groups are created.

We will remove groups that: