Q: I am checking out your forums, but I can't post or reply.  When I try to sign-up it tells me that I need to get a VRS UserId.

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A: In order to cut down on SPAM we require any poster to go through the VRS signup process.  

Our forums are actually divided into publicly accessible forums, and Members Only forums.  Public forums can be read by anyone and thus will be indexed by the various search engines.  Anyone can read the public forums, but to post, you must be a valid VRS user.

Once you get your VRS UserID (it is FREE), you will be able to post to the public forums, and read and post to the Members Only forums.  We provide Members Only forums to allow VRS users to communicate within the VRS community.  Currently this avoids search engines such as Google from indexing the private forums.  There is no technical obstacle for Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com to simply signup for VRS and then index all the Members Only forums, but currently they do not do this, and we hope that they will continue to honor the idea of private forums.

If you want to ensure your communications will remain private, you can start a PRIVATE VRS project and use the "Remarks" section for conversation that will be viewable only by others that have been given access to that project.

This is one of our technical goals: To allow you to determine whether you want your music to be publicly accessible or only available to a small group of collaborators.

Update:

We have updated VRS so that all VRS Projects now automatically have their own individual forums!

If a project is PRIVATE: Only members that are participants in that project can see and post to that project's individual forum.

If a projects is PUBLIC: Any VRS member can see and post to that project's individual forum.

The general VRS forums will not be affected in any way, and we will continue to offer these VRS forums for general subjects of interest for the entire VRS community.