TMVC General Help

1

How can I get in touch with the choir?

Each page has a row of but­tons just below the main header, one of which is label­led Con­tacts. If you click it you’ll be taken to the Con­tacts page where de­tails are given of all the choir’s off­ic­ers. If you can’t see which con­tact to use, try the Sec­ret­ary or the Chair­man, one of whom is sure to be able to help you.

2

Why does my e-mail pro­gram com­plain “Inva­lid (or Un­recog­nized) e-mail add­ress”?

Every e-mail address includes an @ symbol to join the Who part to the Where part. More’s the pity, the big, bad world out there con­tains lots of nasty people who think we’re all fair game as mugs for their nefarious sche­mes. They run pro­grams that roam the Internet look­ing for e-mail add­res­ses of new vic­tims, build­ing lists which they then sell to one another, making life a mis­ery for us all.

This site has its e-mail add­res­ses obs­cured in an att­empt to thwart those pro­grams. So when you click an e-mail link, you have to find "[ at ]" in the "To:" add­ress in your e-mail pro­gram and put "@" in its place, with­out any spaces or punc­tua­tion marks. Then you can con­tinue send­ing your message.

We apologise for the incon­ven­ience this causes, and we hope you will under­stand how (once again) the bad be­havi­our of a few spoils the en­joy­ment of the many.

3

What’s all this about rol­ling my mouse over a photo?

A few pages (in particular our People page) include pho­to­graphs of groups of peo­ple, and a mod­ern, stan­dards-com­pliant brow­ser will show a small white box around a head if you move your mouse over it, to­gether with an iden­tify­ing label. If you then click in the box you will be shown that per­son’s page.

Unfortunately, most versions of Inter­net Explorer for Win­dows don’t under­stand how to do this (we’ve not tested IE on the Mac) and just show the photo un­ador­ned. We recom­mend swit­ching to a diff­erent Web brow­ser to see this fea­ture. Mozilla Firefox is a pop­ular choice, but Google Chrome is coming up fast. Epiphany and Konqueror work well too if you’re running Linux. Sa­fari for Win­dows works well, but we haven’t tes­ted Safari on the Macintosh. Opera suf­fers the same prob­lem as Inter­net Eplorer.

If you’d like to discuss the choice of Web brow­ser, our Web­mas­ter will be pleased to help.

4

I can’t see the whole of the page I want to read. How can I get to the rest of it?

Everybody has a dif­fer­ent com­bin­ation of eyes, screen and web brow­ser, and the de­sign of a web page is a com­pro­mise that hopes to sat­isfy more than it disap­points. Here are some rel­evant factors:

• This site has been designed for viewing on a computer screen, not a hand-held device such as a mobile phone, since we don’t think many people will want to view it on the move (but if you know bet­ter, please let us know).
• You should never have to scroll any page hori­zon­tally, left-and-right, to read the text (if you have a small screen you may have to shift the whole page to the left, hiding part of the left col­umn, but the main con­tent should not need con­tin­ual hori­zon­tal scrol­ling to read it).
• This site does not attempt to get the whole of every page into a single screen that needs no ver­tical scroll­ing; we’ve not adop­ted that style as it would cause too much frag­men­ta­tion of the mater­ial. There­fore you will often need to use the scroll bar at the right of the win­dow to move the page up and down. You should also be able to use the Up and Down arrow keys or the mouse wheel to get the same effect.
• If you find that pressing the arrow keys has no effect, even though you can see that more of the page is avail­able, it may be that the mouse poin­ter is in­side a text box. In that case your bro­wser pro­gram is try­ing to scroll the text box con­tents in­stead of the page (it’s only try­ing to be help­ful). Click your mouse once on the back­ground of the page, then you’ll be able to use your arrow keys as usual.

5

Why can’t I ac­cess the mem­bers’ section?

Each choir member has a user name and pass­word to allow ac­cess to these pages. If you are not a mem­ber but have a rea­son to need ac­cess, please get in touch with the Web­master.

If you do have a user name and pass­word but still can’t get in, your fire­wall may be the prob­lem: you have to set your fire­wall rules to al­low in­com­ing DNS que­ries from our ser­ver (host 88.98.24.69, port 53). This is a stan­dard secur­ity pre­caution that most web ser­vers take.

6

What if I have a com­plaint?

Of course we don’t expect to rece­ive com­plaints, but if any­thing does go wrong, how­ever minor, we want to know about it. Please app­roach our Chair­man first (or an­other mem­ber of the com­mit­tee if you pre­fer), who will be anx­ious to invest­igate the prob­lem and set it right. You can find their de­tails on the Con­tacts page.

7

What should I do if I have a ques­tion that’s not ans­wered on this page?

We want to make your ex­peri­ence of ex­plor­ing our site as re­ward­ing as we can. It’s al­ways poss­ible that we haven’t antici­pated your par­tic­ular ques­tion, in which case please let us know. Click the web­mas­ter’s e-mail link in any page footer. This will start your e-mail pro­gram so you can ask your ques­tion. Make sure you re­place “[ at ]” with “@” in the add­ress be­fore click­ing Send.