Customize your RoR experience

With free membership accounts, RoR offers a variety of features to members. To make your stop at RoR more user-friendly, some of these features include customizing the RoR interface for your own needs. Here is a description of the ways in which you can change your RoR experience.

Information Display Options

The first set of options available on your preferences page determines who you allow to see information about yourself. You have the option to make your email address available to anyone who visits the site, only other RoR members, or nobody at all. For those who want to maintain privacy, this is the mechanism for doing it.

Additionally, you have profile information on this site that you can make available to anyone, or just other members. This way you can provide a description of yourself letting other people know who you are, but deciding whether you want it open to just anyone.

Keep in mind that a membership account is easy and free to make.

Custom Front Page

The front page has a number of options that you can control to make your stay at RoR more comfortable. Essentially your choices include what to view, and how many of them you'd like to view.

Unread Messages

One of your big choices at RoR is to view all recent messages from your available forums, or just the ones you haven't read yet.

By displaying only the messages you haven't read, you will be informed at the top of the front page on how many unread messages you have available. For those who like to read all the content on the site, this is a nice feature that simplifies your reading experience. This can also be useful when the number of posts on the front page is large.

You may instead decide to display some number of the latest forum posts. This might be nice if you like to read posts and keep them displayed on the front page for awhile. This allows you to get back to responding to posts at a later time with ease. Of course, you can always see the last day's or week's worth of posts by going to the Forum page on the top menu bar.

Number of Gallery Items and Posts

You can select how many galleries or posts you want displayed on the front page. This can limit the size of the front page.

Setting the number of posts has an effect based on whether you've selected all or just unread messages to view. If you only view unread messages, setting this number will specify how many of the recent posts the front page should look through for unread posts. If you routinely read all of the posts, there's no reason not to set this to a very high number, since it will only display the messages you haven't read. If, on the other hand, you view all messages, this value can seriously increase the size of your front page. In either case, the big the number, the longer a post will stay on the front page.

Setting the gallery item number has a different effect. By design, the site has a couple of limitations built in. First, it will always display the last week's worth of articles. This is independent of your choice here. Second, it will only display two of any other type of gallery. The front page always displays the most recent article on the top. After that, the software will look for the most recent galleries and display them up to the number you have selected (obeying the two rules above).

Gallery Types on Front Page

You can decide which of the many gallery types should be displayed on your front page. You may decide that you don't want to see some galleries on the front page when they get created, and you can shut those off. Opinion polls automatically get displayed on the front page anyway, so that's one to consider disabling if you haven't.

Semi-public groups

There are groups that exist with their own pages and forums, such as RoRNYC or RoRUK. Some of these groups are open to anyone to join. This list of groups that you can join are on your preference page under "Group Membership Options".

Email Receiving Options

Most of the site links to forum discussions. Galleries, such as quotes, movies, articles, and books, have forums for discussing the items. You can choose to receive emails when someone posts to one of these discussions. This gives you the ability to receive selectively content from this website, according to your interests.

Additionally, after you've joined a group (see above), you can join the mailing list associated with that group. Remember to sign up for the group first.

You should remember that although you can receive emails from these forums, you cannot respond via email. If you want to respond, the emails will have a link to the site that you can select. This will allow you to easily post to the forum.

Customizable Web Directory

The web directory works in a special way. You can choose how many web-directory entries you'd like displayed on the front page. The unique part is which entries will get added to your front page.

Your front page does an elaborate calculation based on the "rating" of each link. First it determines which, if any, links you've voted for. It will choose among those links first to display on your front page. In this way, you can directly control what gets put on your front page by "sanctioning" the links you want.

If you've selected to display more links that you've voted for, it will determine the other links based on voting popularity. In other words, if you haven't voted on links, it will take the highest rated links and choose amongst them. This way, you may be introduced to sites that other people enjoy and recommend.