Group Setup

The name of your group appears above the What's Going On table on Self-Signup Home. It also starts your page footers unless it is the same as Link 1's name.

The timestamp in each Audit Trail entry is set according to the time zone you select in the Time Zone dropdown menu. This setting is also used as the default time zone for your event schedules.

(Note: You cannot directly change your website ID, group owner, or owner's email address. If you need to do so, please email support@prestogem.com).

Webmaster et al

Initially your group's only adminstrator is Webmaster. If you want people to login as themselves when they perform admin actions, you need to give them Admin privilege (using admin-Register Person or admin-Update Person). There is no particular deadline for doing this. But being clear about who has privileges is just good practice.

Webmaster's Email Address is the email address the webmaster gives to login. It is also where PRESTO sends messages related to group management. For example, if you do an Email Announcement and a recipient has a bad email address, the non-delivery notice is sent to your group's webmaster.

Because the webmaster does not have a registration form, you use the Webmaster Roles field to give the webmaster roles. Normally you would care about this only if you want to login as Webmaster and test out conditional activities. In particular, it's a good idea to verify that new conditional-activity names and roles are spelled consistently (e.g. have no typos).

Similarly, the webmaster can do a self-signup so you can check out the self-signup UI and self-signup confirmation messages. But since the Webmaster account is not a real person, you should delete any webmaster signups before you go live.

Audit Trail Messages

The audit trail is a log of your group's actions. You can view and search it as described here. Additionally, the email announcements, registration changes, and signup actions done in your group over the past day are nightly sent to the address specified in the All Major Actions email field. If this field is left blank, it is set to the webmaster's email address.

If you decide to maintain your original database, you ought to fill in the Registration Info changes email field. Setting this field causes the maintainer of your original database to nightly be sent any registration changes in the audit trail.

User Security Policies

If you do nothing, your password policy will be Basic/Auto, the initial privilege level will be Self Only, and self-registration will be allowed.

Password Policy

The available password policies are:

This policy is your dial for trading off security versus convenience. For example, in a small informal group, any inconvenience might be viewed as a worse thing than a lack of security. Conversely the default policy is Basic/Auto rather than Real/Manual because the info stored in a PRESTO database tends to have minimal proprietary value.

Notes:

  1. Basic/Auto or Real/Manual must be used if you plan to Import multiple people with the same email address. (If your policy is Admin-Only, multiple people can still have the same email address, but only if each such person registers with a unique non-blank password).
  2. If you switch to a tougher password policy when there are already-registered people, they will probably not be able to login after you make the switch. Thus you need to inform them that they will have to use the forgot-password link on the Login page.
  3. When your policy is No Passwords and the webmaster's email address is entered, a password field "magically appears" at that point in time. (Thus even when your policy is No Passwords, you have a way to prevent password-less access to admin pages — give no one Admin privileges and instead require that all admins login as webmaster).

Initial Privilege Level

This sets the default initial level applied by Import and Register Person. Your choices are Self Only (the person can only see her own signups), See All Signups (the person can use zooming and List All Signups to see others who have signed up), and Observer (the person can also display reports and send announcements).

When people login to your PRESTO website, what they can see and do depends on the privilege level in their registration info. Although you can always set this individually, it saves labor if the default initial level matches the level of info sharing you want for your group. In practice, small or informal groups are the ones that tend to set a higher initial privilege level.

Self-Registration and Logging In

(Note: recall that Roles is one of the fields in the Registration form).

Your choices are:

The main reasons to disable self-registration are:

Group Info and Trim of your Web Pages

Special Banner

When needed, you can cause the display of a banner message at the top of Self-Signup Home and your self-signup pages. For example, if your group was for reserving tennis courts and you were having a tournament, you might set this field to:

"Notice: tournament this weekend — limited court availability".

Note: it is your responsibility to clear this field when it no longer applies.

Your Group Logo

Notice the logo at the top left of your pages. If you want to use a different image file for it, click on the Choose File/Browse... button of the Group's Logo field and enter its filename. (Note that you may have to refresh the browser window after clicking on Configure's Update button for the change to take effect).

The image in the file should be on the order of an inch big. If your logo is too big, you should edit it to a proper size. For example on Windows, you could run the Microsoft Paint utility and:

Your Group's Page Footer

If you set any of these fields, PRESTO will place a group-specific footer at the bottom of each of your web pages (right above the PRESTO footer):

Using the Audit Trail

When you got to this page, it displayed major actions of the last 24 hours that you had not yet seen. Move your mouse over its Any New Major Actions button to display a count of the major actions that have occurred since you got here. If the count is greater than 0, click this button to display them.

Audit Trail Entries

An entry consists of: a summary line, the action's data, and any feedback (i.e. errors, warnings, and FYIs) produced by the action.

A summary line contains when the action was done, the name of the action, and who did the action. For successful self-signup and self-registration actions, By-Who is the text "by self". Otherwise it is normally a person's name. But if the doer is not logged in (or after certain errors), it is her internet address.

For successful major actions (i.e. registration changes, email announcements, and signup actions), the action's data describes the result of the action:

Otherwise, the action's data is simply what the user entered in the UI. Note that if an action's inputs and feedback can be fit onto the summary line, the entry will only contain a summary line.

The Search link

Click on the Search link to selectively display stuff from the past 10 days. A Search displays the entries that match all the criteria you enter. If you enter no criteria, all entries match. Either way, an error box will be displayed if a Search matches more than 200 entries.

Choose from these criteria:

If you click on the Show Summary Lines button:

Searching for Entries more than 10 Days Old

Each night you are emailed that day's activity. So you can search for old entries on your own system. Note that audit entries in these messages contain extra info in their summary lines, to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

If you search for old audit entries infrequently, searching your email messages might suffice. However email searches are message-oriented, and in this case you want to find specific lines in some daily-activity message.

To setup line-oriented searching, install a text editor, like the free Notepad++, that can search multiple files at once. Then after each daily-activity message arrives:

To do a line-oriented search (using Notepad++ as an example):