Members

All sites and subsites can contain members. If you own a site, you as site owner are a member of the site you own. You can set the permissions of your site (or parts of your site) to allow members to access different areas of the site, make changes to areas, add articles or contact other members.

If you are a member of a site, then you will have a username and password and can log-on, set your privacy settings to control who can see what about you, or who can contact you. The things you can do will depend on what the site owners let you do.

Members can be sent a username and password and so become 'active' on the site (you have to agree to this membership by completing the activation stage). Members may even become a contact point for the site, or become a site office. Alternatively some site owners may decide just to use the site for record keeping and not make any members active.

Members can join more than one site, or more than one area in a site and in advanced settings you can add controls for subscriptions for instance.

Non-members will either be public or guests. Guests have a username and password but it relates to the site, not to the individual and so might be shared (it is not properly secure for this reason). If you were inviting specific people to become members you can send a guest password out to get people to come to your site, then they can sign up and become full members without making access open to everyone.