Frequently Asked Questions - Technical Support

Your account password can be changed by visiting the "My Account" section of the site when logged in.  If you are not logged in, you will not see a "My Account" link.

To reach the "My Account" section of the site, either click the "My Account" link on the upper bar of any page on ChrisMartenson.com, or click the "My Account" menu item on the far right of the top navigation bar.  Once viewing the account, click the "Edit" tab, then look for the "Account information" section.

In the "Account information" section, you'll see two fields: "Password" and "Confirm password".  Enter the new password for your account in both of these fields, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save".  Your password will now be changed.

You might have noticed the word "Subscribe" shown as a link in blog posts and forum threads.  If you click on this link, it gives you a number of options to choose from.  Subscribing to content in this way will result in your receiving e-mail notification when various additions or changes are made in that thread, by that author, or in other ways, according to the options you choose.  To manage your content subscriptions and preferences, click on "My Account" in the navigation bar and choose "My Content Subscriptions."

Here are some hints and tips on how to make the most of this feature:

1. To receive every post Chris Martenson makes on the site, you will want to subscribe to content authored by Chris.
2. The easiest way to do this is first find a post Chris has made on the site.  Any post will do -- a blog entry, Martenson Report, etc.
3. At the bottom of the post and above the start of the comments, you will see a "Subscribe" link.  Click this link, and the screen will expand to show a table of options.
4. In the options list, check "To posts by this author."  Next, click the "Save" button.
5. You will now receive an email notification when Chris has posted new content that he has written.  Notifications are sent out once a day, so a notification may arrive hours after a post has been published.
6. You can also find more options under the "My Content Subscriptions" tab in your account.  This area allows you to choose to receive emails after a comment is made on a particular post, be notified if someone comments on a post you have made, or receive messages if content has been recently updated or modified.

We hope these options will make it easier and more convenient for you to be aware of new content in a timely manner.

First, be sure to use the link sent within 24 hours of requesting it.  If more than that time elapses, you will need to visit the homepage and click on "New Password" again to send yourself a updated link.

If that isn't the issue, read on.

Users can choose to receive their email as HTML or plain text.  This is an option set within your email client (Thunderbird, Outlook, Entourage, etc.)  If you have your email client set to receive HTML, you can click directly on the link to use it.  You may not see the entire link; it will probably look like this:

https://www.chrismartenson.com/user/rese...

If your email client is set to receive messages only in plain-text format, the URL will look like this:

https://www.chrismartenson.com/user/rese... [1] 

The "[1]" next to the URL is a footnote.  You must then scroll to the bottom of the e-mail to find the full link.  You may be able to click on it, or you may need to cut-and-paste the full link into your browser.  It will be a long link and you will need to make sure to include every bit of it or it won't work.

If you currently receive e-mail in plain-text format, switching to HTML format will make it possible for you to receive clickable links from us.

To change your e-mail address, follow these instructions:

1. Make sure you are logged in, or enter your current username and password at the top of the page and click "Log in."
2. After you have logged in, select "My Account > Edit My Profile" from the navigation bar to access your user profile edit page.  Click on the "Edit" tab.
3. Enter your new e-mail in the field titled "E-mail address."
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Submit."

You can go to another member's User Profile page by clicking on their username or avatar anywhere that it appears. You can also search for a link to a user's profile by typing their username in the Search box in the upper right-hand corner and then clicking on their username when it appears in the search results.

If you e-mail us with a question about a problem you are having with our site, you will likely get a response asking you to answer a number of questions that will help us to better investigate the problem.  One of the questions we ask is about JavaScript.  If you are not sure if JavaScript is enabled in your browser, here is how you can find out:

Check if JavaScript is enabled for your browser. This can typically be found in the browser's "Internet Options" section.

For example, in Firefox 3, it can be found by selecting "Tools > Internet Options" from the browser menu, then selecting the "Content" tab.

In Internet Explorer 8, it can be found by doing the following:

1. Select "Tools > Internet Options" from the browser menu
2. Select the "Security" tab, then select "Internet zone" within the Security tab
3. Click the "Custom level..." button and a window will pop up.
4. Scroll down and under the "Scripting" section, check to see if "Active scripting" is set to "Enable."

Clicking on the RSS icon allows you to set up an e-mail feed so that new content on that area of the site is delivered to you via e-mail.  

Whenever an RSS icon is present on a page, it represents an RSS feed for only the dynamic (changing) content on that page.  If content on the given page is "static" by nature, it will not be carried along as part of the feed. 

Here are a few examples:

• An RSS feed icon is found on the main blog page next to the title.  This represents a feed for all blog posts.  As new blog entries are created, this RSS feed will update .
• There is also an RSS feed icon next to the title of every blog post.  This represents a feed containing all of the reader comments for that particular blog entry.  
• You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for each individual forum thread.  The RSS feed for each thread is a continual listing of all the reader comments and responses to the original forum post.
• There are also RSS feeds specifically for Chris' Blog and the Daily Digest.  The RSS for Chris' Blog can be found next to the title on the main page for Chris' blog entries, and the RSS for the Daily Digest can be found next to the title on the main page of Daily Digest entries.

To change your username, just follow these easy instructions:

1. Click the "Secure Login" link at the top of the homepage.
2. Enter your current username and password.
3. After you have logged in, select "My Account > Edit My Profile" from the navigation bar to access your user profile edit page.  Click on the "Edit" tab.
4. Enter a new username for yourself in the field titled "Username."
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Submit."
6. Write your new username somewhere as a reminder for the future.

If CAPTCHA is hard to read, you can keep selecting a new word set until you find one that is legible to you. This is done by clicking the "double arrows" button.

If you click a Recent Comments link and you are taken to the top of the post rather than the comment itself, this means the posted comments are stretching beyond one page.  If you scroll to the bottom of the post, you will see "1", "2", "3", "next >", etc. representing each page of comments.

The easiest way to fix this is display more comments per page.   At the bottom of each page is a "Comment viewing options" section.  By default it shows 50 comments per page.  Increase the number, then click "Save settings".  This will ensure all comments throughout the site are now displayed with more comments per page.  (One important note -- increasing the number of comments per page allows more to be displayed at once, but can also slow down the page load time dramatically.  Use this with caution based on your Internet connection speed.)

Another option is to change the sort order of comments such that newest is first.  This can be done in the same "Comment viewing options" section by selecting "Date - newest first".  By making this change, you will always be taken to the top of the list of comments by click a Recent Comments link.

Please check to see if you are logged in to the site.  If you are, you will see in the upper left corner language which states, "You are logged in as <your username>."  If you are not logged in, please do so to gain access to the reports.

Often an announcement will be placed on the home page of the site letting everyone know a new Martenson Report is available.  This announcement is not the report itself, just an informational notice.  To access the actual reports, visit the Martenson Reports home page by clicking here.

One other consideration is that your enrollment may have recently expired.  To see if your enrollment is current, select "My Account > My Subscription" from the top navigation menu bar when you are logged in to the site.

When reading your e-mail, please check to see if you are viewing it as HTML or plain-text. If you are currently viewing in plain-text, try changing the setting to HTML. Viewing the e-mail in HTML should fix the problem. You may want to adjust your settings so that all incoming mail is read as HTML. If you still have trouble, please tell us what email client and operating system you are using, and we will try to help.

We are currently working to remedy this issue by changing our outgoing e-mails so that they can be read properly in all formats. In the interim, we also have another solution to help our registered users and enrolled members. All newsletter emails sent by ChrisMartenson.com are available in our Newsletters section. The information in this section is exactly the same as the content sent by email.

However, if you are a shaw.ca customer, the e-mails you get from our website may be blank due to a glitch in their system. Please contact shaw.ca’s customer service for help in resolving the issue on their end.

Please perform the following steps:

• Select "My Account" and then "My Profile" from the menu bar.
• Choose the "Edit" tab and scroll down to the "Contact Settings" section.
• Select the checkbox for "Personal contact form."
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Submit."

This will place an email icon underneath your picture on all posts throughout the site. (You won't see an icon under your picture, because you cannot send an email to yourself.) Other registered users will be able to click this icon, which will take them to a page where they can send an email.

Please note, your email address is not displayed to others during this entire process. Only if you decide to respond to the person directly by email will your address be revealed to them.

If you want to contact another user by email, you can only do so if they have enabled the email feature through the above steps.  If you look at a post made by that user, you will see the email icon underneath their picture.  You can click on that icon to send them an email. If there is no email icon it means that they are not open to receiving emails from other users through our system. 

You will not see this e-mail icon underneath your own picture because you cannot send an e-mail to yourself. 

A few email programs have rather strict policies in regards to spam and will automatically place any unknown sender in your spam folder. Yahoo Mail is quite notorious for putting valid emails into spam.

To ensure that you receive all of our emails in your inbox, we recommend telling your system that "chrismartenson.com" is a safe domain from which you would like to receive e-mail.  By doing so, you will be sure to receive every important newsletter, email, alert, and support message from the site.

If it is not possible for you to accept an entire domain name, we recommend adding two email addresses in your email client's address book. When email addresses are added to your address book, you are effectively telling email delivery systems that you consider the sender to be a valid source from which you want to receive messages.  To do this, create new contacts in your email program as you typically would. Add one contact with an email address of "info@chrismartenson.com" and a second with an email address of "support@chrismartenson.com."  This will allow you to receive some of our mailings, but you will still need to check your spam folder periodically as well.  

Please check with your Internet service provider if you have further questions about your spam filter settings.

This can happen when you attempt to copy from Microsoft Word to an Internet page. We use a rich text editor for formatting. The rich text editor is the box you type in that has the buttons on the top for options such as bullet point, bold, italic, etc. Performing a direct copy/paste from Microsoft Word can cause extra Microsoft code to show up on the page.

There are two options:

• Use the button on the top that looks like a little Microsoft Word icon.  If you hover over it, it says "Paste from Word." Click the button and paste your text into that window. Click "Insert" when done.
• If you're still having problems, you can use the button next to it, which has a little icon that has a "T" on it.  When you hover over the button, it says "Paste as Plain Text." Do the same thing...click the button, then paste your text into the window. Click "Insert" when done.

One of those two should work, but a third option would be to disable the rich text editor completely by clicking the "disable rich-text" link right beneath the entry field. You can paste your text in this field, but it will lack formatting without adding basic HTML tags.

1. Click on the "New Password" link at the top of the homepage. If you're already on the Login page, there is a "New Password" tab that you can click on instead.
2. Enter your username or the e-mail address associated with your account.  Click the "E-mail new password" button.
3. A temporary login link will be e-mailed to that address. This link will expire after one day.  If you don't receive a message from us containing a temporary login link, be sure to check your Junk Mail folder or your spam folder to see if it was filtered out by your spam filter.  You may need to make sure your spam filter is set to allow messages from support@chrismartenson.com.
4. Click on the password-embedded link or cut and paste it into your browser.
5. Click on the "Login" button.
6. You will see that you are on the "Edit Account Settings" page.  Enter a new password for yourself in the field titled "Password."
7. Confirm your password by re-entering your new password in the field titled "Confirm Password."
8. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Submit."
9. Write your password somewhere as a reminder for the future.

On occasion, some users may receive a blank page when attempting to view the site. This is fairly uncommon, but when it does happen can be quite frustrating. In most situations, it has to do with a firewall blocking the website, or a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) not updating their cache frequently enough to see site changes.

The list below provides some suggestions of what to do if this problem occurs:

• First, try reloading the page.  Sometimes this is all that is needed.
• Temporarily turn off your computer's firewall, and see if you can then view the site. Sometimes firewall settings can be so restrictive that valid websites are also blocked.
• Clear your computer's cache. This can be done by selecting "Clear Private Data" within the Tools menu of Firefox, or by selecting "Delete Browsing History" under the Tools menu on Internet Explorer.
• Use traceroute (http://www.traceroute.org/#USA) to see if you can notice anything odd in the connection between your computer and our server (174.133.161.183).  Sometimes you might be able to see the jump point where the connection breaks.
• Contact your ISP to ask them about connectivity to 174.133.161.183, and caching of 174.133.161.183 server content.  We have seen a number of situations with smaller ISPs where they do not refresh their caches often enough, and the site is briefly not visible.
• Ask your ISP if they have any policies in place for blocking certain websites.
• Ask a friend, family member, or neighbor to go to the site and see if they are able to access it.  This can help to determine if it is more of a local issue or something more specific to your ISP.
• If you have a laptop, take it to a local coffee shop to see if you can connect to the site through their wireless Internet connection.
• If you work in an office with computers, try accessing the site from work.  This can at least narrow the problem to either a hardware or connectivity issue.

Occasionally we have visitors mention they are having issues viewing one of the Crash Course chapters.  The issues are not specific to any one given chapter, and most often the problems have to do with browser issues, computer processing/memory, or speed of Internet connection. The current Crash Course format provides a rich viewing experience with high-quality video, but the size of the videos has been known to cause viewing issues for some visitors.

The problem can typically be solved by performing one or more of the following:

• Clear the browser cache.  Some information in the cache may have corrupted the video download.
• Close all instances of the browser and restart.  Often the video will not be displayed in this situation because the browser is using too much computer memory.  This might be because the video is competing for memory with another web page, or the viewer has multiple chapters running in multiple windows at the same time.
• Avoid using "embedded" browsers, such as the browser which comes with AOL.  Instead, access the Internet using a fully functional browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Reboot the computer.  Sometimes a program running in the operating system might be causing a conflict with the video.
• Attempt to watch the video with a different Internet connection.  We have had situations where the viewer's Internet connection is either having problems, or just not powerful enough to watch the videos.  He or she was then able to see the video when they took their computer to a coffee shop and connected to the shop's wireless Internet connection.
• Attempt to watch the video on a different computer.  Try on your computer at work, or on a friend's computer.  Some older computers may not have the processing power or memory capacity to handle multiple videos running at once.

Yes. First. make sure you are logged in. Click on "My Account" at the top of the page, then click on the words "My Posts" (or you can click on the "Track" tab on your "My Account" page.)  You'll see a list of all the comments, forum posts, and replies that you have made on the site.

Many people access this site from work.  Whether or not we agree, many work places have content filters that will ban a site based on certain words. Swear words and hate language are two types of content that can get this site on a ban list.

To be fair to the people who might check in at ChrisMartenson.com while at work, and to ensure the accessibility of our message, we need to ask that everyone refrain from using this type of language.  In the event that we find such language, we may modify it.  If the post in question is completely irreparable, we may remove it. 

We hope you will understand why this is necessary.

If attempting to add a link with the rich-text editor enabled, it is necessary to highlight the text to be turned into a link, then click the icon above which looks like a "chain link".  A window will then pop up which allows entry of the URL to be referenced. If "<a href="http://www.chrismartenson.com">link</a>" is written in the rich-text editor, it will be displayed as text, not a link. 

The reason it works this way is the text editor doesn't know if the commenter wants to create a link, or if a comment post is in regards to HTML programming and the goal is to display the actual written code.  This approach allows for both to be included.

Second, it is possible to have "<a href="http://www.chrismartenson.com">link</a>" recognized automatically as a link, but only if the rich-text editor is disabled, and if the URL is prefixed with "http://".  The editor can be disabled by clicking the "disable rich-text" link below any entry field.

There is a known bug with using Safari and the rich-text editor.

If you use Safari, you have one of two options: (a) disable the rich-text editor and type the HTML directly (by clicking the "disable rich-text" link below the text entry field), or (b) use an alternate browser such as Firefox (recommended) or Camino.