Remember a time when all you had to do to write a story was open a notebook or even ask the waitress for a napkin? Those days are long gone and now you have to try to log in to a website before you can post your material and – Hark! Up ahead! Are those difficulties on the horizon already?

Registration Procedure:
The procedure for registering and logging in is a fairly simple one. Click the Register link (its location will vary based on the skin the archive is currently using, but it can usually be found under the tab or header that reads “Write Stories”) and fill out the included form. Make sure to choose a penname that is appropriate for the site and adheres to our 12+ Rule. You will also want to include a valid e-mail address. We recommend avoiding servers like AOL. Scroll down and take a look at "A Day in the Life of a Password Notification E-mail" to better understand why certain e-mail servers work better than others and the fail-safe's for getting your password to you safely.

Once you have registered, the next thing you will want to do is log in and post your story but, you can’t… Instead, settle in, go get a real book to read or grab an entire season of your favorite TV show on DVD because it can take anywhere between 5 minutes and 24 hours for your password to arrive.

If you receive your password, copy and paste your password into the login box. Note, if you have difficulties at this point, skip ahead to “The Perils of Login.”

If you are able to successfully login on your first shot, congratulations, you are among an elite group of Potter-fans, globally united against…well…something… If you didn’t receive your password after 24 hours, proceed to “A Day in the Life of a Password Notification E-mail.”

A Day In The Life Of A Password Notification E-mail:
The world out there in cyber-space is a terrifying web of proxies, servers and anti-spam measures which your tiny, inconsequential and unprotected password e-mail must navigate, battle and survive in order to get to you. Once upon a time, the e-mails sent from harrypotterfanfiction.com had the kind of idealistic hope that can only be found in small children and propaganda films, until one fateful day when a rouge e-mail made its way, backward, through the web of horrors and reached the HPFF server room again, packet full to the brim with tales of war, hatred and the dreaded AOL SpamBlocker service. Since then, our little e-mail elves have been downtrodden and despondent, wandering through cyberspace with no real heart so, in order to ensure that you get yours, there are a few measures you will need to take to bolster morale.

Remember, this one’s for Dumbledore.

If you chose not to heed our advice in the previous section about AOL e-mail addresses, or if you are being directed to this page after having already commited that, the greatest of all sins, there is little hope for you receiving your password the normal way. Please register a secondary e-mail address with a server like Hotmail or Yahoo! and contact the staff at HPFF about getting a replacement password and having your e-mail address updated. When doing so, you will need to provide us with your registered e-mail address (the original AOL address you used), your penname, as well as the new e-mail address you plan to use with the account in future. We will issue you a new password and update the e-mail address under your account settings to verify that this does not happen in future. If you are able to login at this point, go have a cookie and a glass of milk. It’s been a long road but, you persevered and, blast it, you made it through! If you still can’t login and are suspecting that you and your PC might have been subject of a dark curse, fear not, there is hope for you still – proceed to “The Perils of Login” and give a try to those suggestions.

If you were wise, or simply aren’t an AOL user, but still haven’t received your password, your original e-mail probably lays, beaten, on the side of a firewall battlefield but, for you, there is a re-enforcement that can be called in – please, don’t send our boys into a hopeless battle, however, take the necessary precautions to ease their passage and ensure their victory. What does that mean? Servers like Hotmail and Yahoo! also have precautions against bulk and junk mail senders and, more often than not, our adorable little e-mails will be painted with that brush unless you tell your e-mail server otherwise. The process is simple, just add “no-reply[at]harrypotterfanfiction[dot]com” to your contact or friends list, replacing [at] with @ and dot with a period. Once you have done that, click the “forgot password” link on the HPFF.com Login page and enter your e-mail address into the form. You should have your password within 24 hours. If not, you, my friend, are cursed. Please get up from your computer chair, hop three times, counterclockwise, around your PC chanting “There’s no place like HPFF! There’s no place like HPFF! There’s no place like HPFF!” then go make me a sandwich. Or, you could just keep reading.

Still no luck, eh? Did you really do the sandwich thing? It’s lunch time over here, you know…. Hrm… Well… If you aren’t able to login at this point, don’t give up hope – after all, we have a solution for the AOL users – don’t we? – and if we can help them, we can help anyone. What you will want to do at this point is contact our staff via the helpdesk, let them know that you have attempted to retrieve your password using the forgot password link as well as added us to your contact list and, still, or little e-mail wasn’t strong enough to survive. If you provide us with your penname, the e-mail address you registered the account with, and a cookie, we will generate a new password for you but, remember, you cannot generate a forgotten password on your own, so make sure to write it down somewhere that your kid sister won’t find.

But wait – there’s more – if you attempted to recover your password and were greeted with the unpleasant notification that “That E-mail Address Is Not In Our Database” please take a moment to look at the section entitled “Existential E-fiction.”

Existential E-Fiction:
The software on which harrypotterfanfiction.com runs is deeply contemplative and it is important to respect that quality about it when you are attempting to access the riches it holds within. In order to do that, please respect that, from time to time, the site simply will not cooperate. What that can mean for each of us is that sometimes, you tell it to do something and it simply refuses. So, before you panic about a funky error message that says your e-mail address is no longer in the database, stop and verify that the site was not enduring one of said existential crisis when you attempted to register. To do that, you can browse the author list using the “Find an Author” feature.

If your penname appears in the list, then you are in fact registered and should consider the possibility that you used a different e-mail address to register with or, perhaps, made a typo. Most importantly, however, do not contact the staff if you cannot remember your registered e-mail address. Our privacy policy does not permit us to share the e-mail addresses of our registered users with anyone – particularly those who claim to be them.

If your penname does not appear on the list, one of three things could have happened. 1. You didn’t really register. In truth, you’ve never been to the site in your waking hours. Last night, a bit of undigested Pop-Tart collided uncomfortably with your psyche and caused a fantastic dream about a site, so wonderful that it is beyond measure by the human brain, and you registered there, frolicking about the web for hours before being unpleasantly awakened by your alarm clock. 2. Your penname was in violation of the Terms of Service and was either a) caught by our system automatically or b) removed by a passing staff member when they saw it. 3. This is the most likely option, that your registration did not take due to either server instability or a timeout. In any case, please feel free to register a new account and start reading this article all over again. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

The Perils of Login:
I’ve penned two and a half pages on getting your password and yet, there are more horrors held in your future. Yes, the perils of login are possibly the most ominous because, unlike the hazards of e-mail, no one can hear your screams as you battle, one on one, in intense hand-to-hand combat with your internet browser. For a few lucky souls, their internet browsers will readily accept that harrypotterfanfiction.com is a friendly site that would never hurt you or your hard drive but, for those PC’s that have had their hearts broken before, it may be more difficult. Thus, the following instructions have been written for those internet browsers already diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

If the problem is your password – and you’ll know, because the page will read “That password doesn't match the one in our database. Please try again or retrieve a new password if you can't remember yours.” - the solution is simple – make certain that a) you are using the correct password; b) you are typing the password in the correct case and you are not making any typos; c) you are using the correct penname, without any typos and d) your penname still exists. If you’re certain that all of those things are correct to the best of your ability, it’s time to give getting a new password a try. Before doing this, you’ll want to scroll back and take a glance at “A Day in the Life of a Password Notification E-mail,” which will help you to ensure that your password re-generation works for you.

If, like so many of our users, the password seems to be correct, and yet the page simply won’t move (or appears to refresh), the issue is with your cookies. Next time, try using a bit more egg. Kidding.

AOL is our most formidable enemy. Stubborn and brutish, AOL is to our site’s login system what Kevlar is to bullets – unbe-freaking-leivably impenetrable…unless you’re using the right kind of bullets…er…cookies. Still, they’re not the only browser we have a problem with – Internet Explorer, Safari and even Firefox have been known to give us trouble and, while I would love to recount the exact instructions here, because they change so often, it’s really better that I link you to a list of instructions that, I promise, will remain as up-to-date as I can keep it. [Help Is On The Way]

Final Thought:
I know that logging in sounds like a lot of work but, for all of my detailed and whimsical instructions, no one of the steps listed above takes more than 5 minutes to complete and, trust me, you’ll be better off for the knowledge later when you encounter the problem at a site less friendly than our own.

Go forth with this knowledge, knowing that you now possess great power and, with great power comes great responsibility…and cool features like Favorite Stories.