There's nowhere on the home page for me to input my username and password!

If, when you first arrive at the web site for a session you are unable to log in because text reading 'Return to members area' is appearing to the right of the home page, where the log-in form should be, then it is likely that your computer is blocking the ROOTS cookie, needed for the log-in process to work properly.

To solve the problem, you will need to enable cookies on your computer. If you do not wish to enable cookies for all sites, you should enable them for the ROOTS website, or make ROOTS a 'safe' site. You should also clear out your temporary Internet files. When this one-off procedure is complete, restart your computer before trying to log in again. You should then be able to access the site without trouble.

If you need to know more about cookies, or why we use them on this site, please see the page About cookies.

The screen goes blank and / or you get an error message telling you that the page cannot be found or the site cannot be contacted.

This indicates a connection problem. Sometimes choosing to 'Refresh' or 'Reload' will solve the problem, if the issue was only temporary. If that doesn't help, and the problem is still occurring after ten minutes or so, you should check your ISP's (Internet Service Provider's) status line or web page to see if they are experiencing any problems. If they are, then you will not be able to access the site until they have resolved the issue.

Sometimes your ISP may be able to serve up many web pages from a cache (local store of files), and may appear to be operating well, but may not be able to serve up 'live' pages efficiently. The ROOTS help and information pages can be cached, so you may be able to see these, but the password protected area contains 'live' pages and so you may not be able to access these if your ISP is busy. There can also be general 'traffic jams' on the Internet at busy times, and so often the only answer is to try again later, when the problem is likely to have cleared up.

Finally, it is possible that the ROOTS web server is experiencing problems. You can contact us to find out if that is the case. When we become aware of any problems at our end, we post an announcement to the 'Web issues' forum, with the title 'Status', so that readers can check back to find out what has happened.