Help: Signing up: Nicknames and Email addresses

Signing up: Nicknames and Email addresses

Signing up is easy! We are delighted to welcome you: join here. Please read the terms of service first (they're very short and friendly).

• Your nickname: This is your online pseudonym, and can be anything you choose. Some people like to use their first-name (eg 'John'); others prefer a nickname (eg 'Cookie Monster'), or a fictional character (eg 'Romeo'); others prefer a descriptive phrase (eg 'Friendly Thespian'). Be inventive!
  
  Please choose your nickname carefully, since it cannot later be changed without closing and re-creating your account from scratch. Don't use your full name (or an identifying code eg CRSID). It's also a good idea to consider grammatical context (consider writing a message which begins "Dear Chocolate Lover..." vs. "Dear I love chocolate..."). Nicknames must be unique, so you may be prompted to choose an alternative.
  [Technical details: nicknames must be 3-30 characters long, and can't contain the following characters: semicolon, comma, full-stop, angle-brackets, ampersand, single/double-quote, backtick, backslash.]
  
  
• Your email address: We ask that you use an email address ending in '.ox.ac.uk'.
  If you want to use the LoveWeb, which matches people up according to whom they mutually say they fancy, then your email needs to be guessable by someone who might fancy you. So, it is in your interest to sign up with your most 'obvious' email address, if you have more than one.
  
• As it can cause us problems, please do not use your 'herald.ox.ac.uk' or 'maillist.ox.ac.uk' or 'ecs.ox.ac.uk' or 'physics.ox.ac.uk' email addresses. (This is problematic because it allows people to create multiple accounts. It also makes it very hard to guess the right unique address on the LoveWeb.)
  
  
• Your gender: Not everyone fits neatly into the traditional ("heteronormative") male-female dichotomy. If this affects you, you're still very welcome here; we ask you to please choose the most nearly-appropriate option at the point of signup, follow through the basic profile-wizard, and then elaborate within your profile (which supports many more options). [more: technical.]
  
  
• Security: Your initial password is generated by a concatenation of two words. This should be easy to remember, and relatively hard to guess, but it is a good idea to change it. Your password is sent to you by email, so as to authenticate that the person who logs in is the owner of that email address. N.B. Don't let other people have access to your email account. [security info]