Welcome to the Landing help pages!

You've come to the right place if you are looking for help using the site . 

Check the help pages for help with using the Landing or about specific features of it.

Popular starting points:

• Your First Visit to the Landing
• Getting to know the Landing
• Notifications - turning email and web alerts on and off
• Controlling privacy
• Hints and tips
• What's new
• Known bugs and undesirable features

Common issues:

Fatal error logging in: if you get a fatal error when logging in, the chances are that you have previously disabled your account. Contact landing@athabascau.ca to get it reinstated.

Too many notifications: you can control these from the You|Your personal notification settings and from the Groups|Your group notification settings menus. 

Problems embedding video:

The Landing tries to convert video links to embedded videos. Unfortunately, and becoming more of a problem every year, most web browsers now rather annoyingly default to hiding video that is embedded from external sites, for much the same reasons that we do not allow you to use embed codes from sites - it can be a major security issue if someone has embedded malicious code. It is a particular problem to attempt to embed a video from a non-secure server in a secure encrypted page like all of those on the Landing. Unfortunately, your browser probably has no idea that we are prefiltering such content so everything on the Landing should be entirely safe. The upshot of this is that your video may not show for everyone even though the Landing is making it available correctly. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi, Firefox and Internet Explorer can be made to work with a couple of clicks.  Chrome may fail even when you do try to enable video, though it shouldn't.

Workarounds... 

• If you are using Firefox (latest), click the small 'i' at the left of the address bar, find the secure connection warning, click the arrow next to it, then click 'Disable protection for now.'
• If you are using Vivaldi, simply click the 'no entry' symbol at the right of the address bar
• If you are using Chrome, click the shield to the right of the address bar then click 'load unsafe scripts'
• If you are using Internet Explorer, look for a popup bar that will appear at either the top or the bottom of the browser window asking you if you want to allow unsafe content (the answer is 'yes' - it is not unsafe at all!)

If this annoys you (it annoys me) it is usually possible to permanently change settings for the browser so that it always displays the videos embedded in the Landing correctly. See your individual browser documentation for details - these vary considerably from one browser version to the next. Generally you should look for security settings and, where options are available, trust the Landing.

It is not a bad idea to provide just the address and path for the video, removing the 'https://' part - e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcqfM7QRbcE - this will not create a hyperlink or embed the video, but at least your readers will be able to copy the URL and view it directly.

We have now added a small notice explaining the problem for those that cannot see the video. This works on most browsers but may not work on yours. We recommend Firefox as the most standards-compliant and least privacy-invading browser currently available. We hope to have a more permanent fix at some time in the future. 

Final proviso - it may not be the browser's fault

Video providers on rare occasions change the way their code works. If they do that, our auto-embed tool for that site will normally stop working. As above, we suggest removing the 'http://' or 'https://' part of the address when you paste it in.

More help:

If you have a question, a suggestion, a comment or a concern, feel free to join the group and post it to the Help Group's discussion forum or post quick questions to the group's Wire (see the widget for that below). Someone will usually respond fairly quickly.

There are also a number of other resources that you may find useful within this group, including some files offering things like video introductions, and bookmarks. The group blog is used for occasional news announcements.

This help group is (always) a work in progress and is developed by the community itself: no one is paid to do write this stuff. If something is missing or confusing, please either mention it or fix it! Most of the help pages may be edited, and all can be commented on. We welcome any and all contributions from all members of the Landing. Note: you will need to join this group if you wish to add or change anything here.

If you would like to contribute to the development of the Landing by offering advice, ideas, feedback and critique, please consider joining The Friends of the Landing, an open group for anyone interested in making the site a better place.

If you would prefer to use email for help, support or advice on using the Landing, please mail landing@athabascau.ca - this will be seen by the whole team that supports the site so someone should normally get back to you quite quickly.

Please note: this group is intended for help with using the site. We'd love to help with other things,  but we cannot deal with content-related issues like where to post your portfolios or deadlines for coursework submission. Please contact relevant tutors, coordinators, academic administrators etc if your problem is not with using the Landing itself.