Tampa Bay Online uses the logon ID for one reason. It provides us the control to revoke bulletin board access to those who break the terms of the user agreement.

The Tampa Tribune, Tampa Bay Online, Media General and Business Technologies do not provide these bulletin board logon IDs and passwords to outside vendors, telemarketers or internet spammers. This information is kept secret.

The reason that we request your date of birth for your logon ID is that many bulletin board logon IDs are similar. The birthdate field adds a variable that is easy for you to remember and easy for us to identify.

"Free" email accounts (such as @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, etc.) will no longer be acceptable ways to register. Those email accounts will be blocked from registering with the boards and chat. Only legitimate accounts will be accepted. As stated above, your email address, as well as other information, will be held in confidence. Unless YOU include your email address on posts, other users will not have access to it.

Changing your password: To change password, the user has to go into chat. Then he or she types .password and their new password. An example would be if a user wanted to change their password to "chimp," they would go into chat and type .password chimp.