Frequently Asked Questions about our website.
After creating your account, you will receive an auto-generated password. You should be able to copy and paste this password when logging in to your new account. After logging in, you can change the password to something easier for you to remember.
Sometimes for various and mysterious reasons, these auto-generated passwords do not work. Please send an email to the webmaster and request a new password.
If you should request a new password and encounter similar problems as stated above, contact the webmaster for assistance.
The webmaster is normally available Tuesday - Friday, 9:00 am to 5:30 pm.
Problems connected with the use of this site will be addressed as soon as possible during those hours.
If you have an issue that needs a response during other hours, please contact the editor.
There are known issues with hotmail and gmail accounts. You will receive error messages if you try to create an account with a hotmail or gmail address. Please select another email account. If that is not possible, the only workaround is to email the webmaster with your choice of user name and password, and your account will be created for you.
This type of post would be considered a Classified Ad and would need to be placed in our Classifed Section. Contact a Sales Representative at 770-719-1880 for more information.
You currently do NOT have to register, or log on, or subscribe in order to view much of our content. However, in order for you to take advantage of many new features, such as posting your own stories as a Citizen Journalist, posting comments to stories and forums and creating your own blog and searching this site, you must be a registered subscriber of our Web site. But, logging on is FREE. You simply enter your actual e-mail address and our database e-mails you a site password. You may then log in using that password. At that point you may change your password if you wish. If all you wish is to view our content, browse to your heart’s content without subscribing.
Contact a Sales Representative by calling 770-719-1880
or send an email to: ads@thecitizen.com and your information will be forwarded to a Sales Representative.
You must be a registered member and logged in to post comments.
To comment on stories, click on the add new comment link to open the story, then scroll down to the end of the story to reach the Reply box . If other comments have already been made, click on the Reply link of the person whose comment you wish to reply.
If you want to create a blog where you can post your comments on a regular basis, go to the address below.
http://www.thecitizen.com/node/add/blog
Linking to Yahoo.com would be: (less than symbol)a href="http://www.Yahoo.com">Yahoo.com
The symbol for less than (<) needs to be placed in front of a href=. Double quotes should surround the full address.
If you are logged in and the add comment or reply links are grayed out, it may be a problem with your browser. Please log off completely by clicking on the link below or "log out" at the bottom of the gray menu box on the far left column. Simply quitting or restarting your browser does not automatically log you out.
Once logged out, empty your cache and delete the cookies for The Citizen.com. If you are using Internet Explorer visit the following link for help if you need it.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835
click link below to log out:
www.thecitizen.com/logout
Trying a different browser may also help. Sometimes changing your password and logging in again with the new password works.
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If you are logged in and are being returned to the login screen when attempting to post, it may indicate that you have wandered into a restricted area. Click on the The Citizen logo in the top left hand corner to take you back to the main page. Emptying your cache or restarting your browser may also help with this problem.
Multiple ways. A new way is to become a Citizen Journalist, finding and reporting news that you see or know about. Click on the "You Report!" line in the navigation block on the left side of the page. Write your story. Spell-check it. Your story goes into a “moderated queue,” where it will be viewed by an editor at The Citizen. If the story is approved, the editor will release your story to the Citizen Journalism box on our site. Other ways to interact with our site include starting and maintaining your own blog, and commenting on much of our editorial content and other comments.
As Fayette County and surrounding areas continue their rapid growth, it is becoming increasingly impossible for a newspaper staff to be everywhere at once. That's where you come in. By becoming a Citizen Journalist, you can make sure that the news that is important to you gets told. You get the information, you write the story and — once registered and logged in — you post your stories on our site. Run spell-check because your post is likely to go up as is. So post your pictures and news here and tell the community what's going on in your neck of the woods.
Whatever that’s of local interest that interests you. Some examples: youth sports games, scores and schedules; soccer league news; a neighborhood association meeting; traffic situations; where the lowest gas prices are; school events (such as math club meets, PTO meeting, fund-raising drives, bus route concerns, etc.); church news (what your pastor talked about Sunday, what the ladies’ group is planning, etc.); subdivision happenings (block party, Neighborhood Watch issues, speeders, etc.); city and county meetings that you attend; pretty much anything that you think another person might be interested in reading about. Don’t take this list of examples as a limit: Post whatever you like, and it probably will go on our site (provided it’s free of profanities, obscenities, libel, attacks on private persons — and your fifth-grader’s teacher is for our purposes a private person — and keeps name-calling to a minimum.) Try to stick to the facts of the situation you are reporting on. Save your opinions for your blog, forum and comments postings on this site. Plagiarism warning: DON'T COPY somebody else's writing and post it as your own. Also, don't include any material not your own in your postings without telling where it came from and who wrote it. This includes passing along forwarded e-mails and other Internet material whose original source you don't know. Stick to stuff you personally know or witness.
Keep it clean. No obscene language. No threats of physical harm. No personal attacks on private persons. No "outing" or otherwise identifying or threatening to identify our registered users or their family members. Violate these simple, civilized rules, and we will remove your posts and ban you from any further posting. If you use sexual or smutty innuendoes, you will be banned from posting. Suggestions: Name-calling is usually just plain rude. Make your point with facts and logic. No plagiarism. Additional Citizen Journalist guidelines are in this FAQ above.
Yes, once you are logged on (which is FREE). The search function is limited to the dynamic content on the site, meaning that many static pages (mainly archives) cannot be accessed by the site search engine yet.
To search the static pages, follow these directions:
Thanks to Google, I can now search with confidence and generally find what I’m looking for right away. You need to type in a special search command after you type in your keyword(s) or key phrase.
Let’s say I want to find an article on The Citizen about the proposed Kroger for north Peachtree City. I would type in the following:
“Peachtree City”+Kroger site:thecitizen.com
It’s important to note that there’s one space between your keywords/keyphrase and the word site -- that is, between Kroger and site. And once you type in site you put a colon with no space between site and thecitizen.com. You also leave off the www.
This Google trick also works for other sites but I find it especially helpful with dredging for articles from news sites. Always remember, the more specific (but brief) you are with your keywords and keyphrases, the more likely you’ll find what you want in the first place.
Our site has been converted from a static site to one that is dynamic, or database driven. The static site consisted of thousands of html-coded pages powered by links. In other words, if you wanted a page, you had to find a live hyperlink to that particular page on our Web server. Now, clicking on a hyperlink places a “call” to a database engine, which then serves up the requested item, whether document or image, from the innards of the database itself and not from a stack of electronic pages. The served item goes to a predetermined box within a standard template, making life a lot simpler for many of us humans who until now had to create each and every static page as a separate html document and load it onto our server.
No, not yet. All current content is on the database. But much of our previously published material (pre-October 2005) remains on static pages. You can search the current material from our site search engine, accessible from the front page. For pre-October 2005 material, see the question about searching our site using Google. We are working on moving from static to dynamic throughout the site and on adding more and more features, especially the features that allow you more interaction with the site.