To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max Comments system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

You will also find this statement:

"Important Note: It is essential that you do NOT use the BACK button on your browser in the following pages. If you do, you will probably see a message that says "Warning: Page has Expired." This will not happen as long as you use the buttons provided. Thus, there's really no need to use the BACK button. "

Hopefully, that is self-explanatory. All the buttons you need are included on the webpages. Please do NOT use the BACK (or FORWARD) buttons on your browser. This caveat is necessary because the system can lose data unless you use the navigation buttons provided on the Max Comments pages.

(Technical note: Actually, it won’t lose data, but it can appear that way because of warning messages that may appear if you use the BACK button on your browser.)

This is the main operating page. It looks like this:

Click for larger image

Let’s look at this list:

It shows you the list of 'authors', that is, the people who have signed up to enter comments on your website.

You'll see the author's name, the date that the most recent comment was submitted, the number of comments that author has submitted, and their status (meaning pending, verified, or suspended. A pending author signed-up, but has not verified the email address by clicking on a link in the email gotten. A verified author has clicked on that link.  A suspended author is one that you suspended (in the Modify section.)

Next to each author, you see 3 links: View Author, View Comments and Modify.  To see the details of a given author, click on View Author.  To see a list of all the comments that author has entered on your webpages, click on View Comments.  To Modify the author info, click on Modify.

You can also choose to Remove the user completely, if you wish. You would put a check mark in the Remove column, and then click the Delete Checked Authors button at the bottom of the list. (It’s unlikely that you’ll want to do this, very often.  However, note the message at the bottom. When you delete an author, their comments remain. Unless you specifically deleted them, in the View Comments section.)

When you click on the word Modify on the same line as the Name, it takes you to a screen where you can make changes to the author info, if you need to. Note the Status.  A status of P means 'pending.'  The author has signed up, but hasn't clicked on the verify URL in the email received.  A status of V means 'verified.' That is an author who has completely gone through the sign-up process.  And a status of S mean that the author is suspended by you.

The Author Ranking is implemented here, but the only significance of that drop-down box is for you to suspend the author, if you don't want to completely remove the author, but no longer wish for that person to be able to add comments.

On the main control panel display, note that word Name at the very top of the list in the colored row can be clicked on. If you do so, it will show you the list sorted by Author Name. The same is true of the word Status.

Now suppose you have lots of authors. Say you have 500 authors. Or even more. You probably don’t want the whole list on one page. So the list is "page-inated." This means you only see a certain number at one time, say 50. You can hit the Next and Back words, in order to see more of the list. This number is configurable. You can set it to be whatever you like (in the Configuration section.).

What about the other button on this page? You can find out more here:

Now, let’s look at the way you setup your pages for including the ability to view and add comments....