The Freebok Home section contains pages where you can manage the settings of your Freebok user account. These settings include your own information, privacy settings, credits and other miscellaneous settings. Additionally, this is the place where you manage your buddy list, read your private messages and send messages to other Freebok users.

Settings

Propably the single most important settings of a user account are the secret question and the related secret answer. These settings will become important should you forget your password and a replacement password cannot be sent to the private email address defined for your account (that's why you should keep the private email address up to date). In a case like this a replacement password can be sent to an email address you choose, but only if you have defined the secret question and answer, and remember the answer correnctly. Defining the secret answer should be one of the first things you do after creating a user account, as this is the only way of getting a new password, when your old email address is not functional.

The settings page has several options that you can modify, such as the language and locale settings and inline help and sidebar visibility.

Own Information

Because of the discussion and buddy features (more about them later) it would be desirable for all users to provide some information about themselves. Many users think that it's nicer to have a discussion when you know more about the other party than just the username. For this purpose each user has a profile page that can be found at

http://www.freebok.net/~username/index.html

The contents of the user profile depends on user's Privacy Settings and what has been defined in the User Information page. Besides the user information, the profile page may list user's buddies, guestbooks and forums.

Providing your personal information to Freebok is optional so you can appear anonymously if you wish to do so. Alternatively you can limit the display of your information by using the Privacy settings. One option is to show your information only to users on your buddy list, for example.

Private messages and events

Other users can send private messages to you from your profile page. You can read these messages from the Messages and Events page. You may receive different kinds of notifications to the message list as well; for example, a notification will be sent to you if another user wants to add you to her buddy list. You can accept or reject the request directly from the list.

You can use the messages page to reply to the messages you have received and write new messages to other Freebok users.

Freebok buddies

The Freebok Buddy List is a sort of an address book of the user names of users you meet on the discussion forums. It's easy to send private messages directly from the Buddy List, and you'll also see when your buddies are online.

Affiliated Forums

You can manage forum settings from this page when you join a Freebok forum.

The forum feature is under testing and not publicitely available at the moment.

Sidebar

The Sidebar appears on the side of each Freebok page and contains different kinds of tools. The sidebar takes some space, so you can hide it if you wish to free that space for the main page contents. Most of the sidebar tools are available only for logged in users.

These are some of the tools available at the moment:

Site Settings
The Site Settings tool allows you to change settings that affect the Freebok site.

Notifications
The Notification tool will tell you when you have new messages.

Shortcuts
With the Shortcuts tool you can make direct links to the Freebok pages that you use most often.