Quick Start (How This Site Works)

A Little Scared?

Click "Forum" above and you'll see the main Categories of the Forum.

If you've arrived here terribly confused, at your wits end, but want to proceed slowly with whatever happens, you may want to ask questions or spill your guts on the "Choosing to Stay" forum. The protocol there is that members are supposed to go easy on the ivorce-day advice. If you're looking for ways to put spark back in your marriage, the cynicism and pessimism there will likely be brought up anyway, but your optimism and idealism shouldn't be denigrated. Skittish new folk may find it easiest to dip their toes in there.

If you click "Profile" above, there is a button labeled "Update Status". If talk of divorce is unwelcome, you may want to make your status say something, gently, to that effect. e.g. "Devout. Divorce not an option".  That way, if you respond to a thread not on "Choosing to Stay" some people may provide more targeted feedback. Others may not notice your status says that, so try to be patient with well-intentioned if unwelcome advice.

You may also want to post a short bio on the "Introduce Yourself" thread here on the "Welcome" category. 

If you aren't afraid of tough love or you're not feeling much like saving the marriage, you might get more brutal (honest?) answers when posting your situationship on the "SM (Sexless Marriage) Issues" category.


Posting a Message
Click "Reply" at the top of a thread to post a comment unrelated to anyone else's comment.

Clicking "Quote" on a post copies the post into a new rich-text reply window you can respond in. You can remove parts that aren't relevant to your reply to supply context to anyone reading your comment. NOTE: Before you remove any of the quote, add a few carriage returns (Enter key) after the quote. When you edit the quote, for some reason, you can't get the cursor to locate after the quote.

Shout Outs
If you mention another ILIASM user in a comment, place an "at" symbol, @, before their name in order to notify them that you mentioned them if you wish to invite them to chime in on your conversation or maybe if you are saying something nice and you'd like them to know they are appreciated. These notifications show up in your "Profile" link. This is called "tagging" and if you see you have been "tagged" in your profile, you have been mentioned in that post. 

Save Yourself Trouble
At very odd times, you may find you have written a long response and lose it through a glitch.
Either ILIASM's web site or your computer's fault.
After writing a substantial passage, save the entry. You can then go to the drop down menu of the post and select "Edit" to add to it or to actually edit.



You can also highlight what you wrote and press control-C to copy your work to the clipboard before saving, just in case the save itself glitches.

Don't count on this as a saving mechanism though. Glitchy computers won't save that way if they get a blue screen of death.



Losing ten minutes or more of effort can be demoralizing. Don't come to vent frustration and have a glitch cause more instead.


Catching Up
baza offers a tip towards speeding up finding what you need:

"At some point you'll strike a posting from a member that resonates with you and you might want to read more by that member."

Say, Brother ironhamster , as an example.

See how his name appears in light blue just above ?

If you click on it, it will take you to his profile page and from there you'll have access to everything he's ever posted on here."

The posts are in chronological order so you can find a member with a situation similar to yours and how they handled it. (or maybe didn't yet?)


Keeping Up
In the upper right corner you'll see a button that says "Participated" or "(New) Participated". This button shows you threads you participated in, noting whether anyone else has posted to them since you did. This is helpful towards keeping current with conversations you're actively engaged in.

In your PM (private mail), accessed by clicking "Messages", you typically want the most recent reply. Do that by clicking the last number button beneath the email title. This can be good for forum threads as well. 

To get to a forum's board quickest, I like to hover my cursor over the words "ILIASM Forum" in the upper left. This makes the "General" category appear, then a sub-menu of the categories. These include markers for which categories have new posts since your last visit.


Feedback
Members may choose to approve of someone's post by clicking the "Thumbs Up" symbol. I'd like to advise members that when a member writes about a sad, angry, or frustrating episode of their sexless lives, many of us would like to approve of your post and lend moral support, but clicking "Thumbs Up" and saying you "like" the post sends an odd message.

Please do not assume your report has gone unnoticed or unappreciated. People may just feel weird about giving such an unhappy post the "Thumbs Up" button We don't "like" suffering at all and you'll find the "like" clicks coming most when we hear your stories of improving, making the most of, or leaving your SM. 

On the flip side, if someone gives you a thumbs up that you haven't had sex with your spouse for fifteen years, assume it's a show of support for solving your problem, rather than sadism. There can be a lot of "tough love" flying around sometimes, but I haven't seen anyone bearing actual taunting yet.

Finally, some feedback can be hard to hear. I've seen two members interpret it as hostile and leave ILIASM (not many at all given I've been here for years) I've not seen that to be the case once, but interpretation on the receiving end is everything.

It's often meant to be "tough love". If it's getting a bit heavy, you may want to signal distress early. Sometimes you need a bit more "love" and less "tough". That's fine. No one should be chased away from a support group when they're needing help or trying to help others. 

The landmine for both member that I saw leave was the urging for these refused spouses to consider the possibility that their spouse was only asexual with them, and that they may end up being sexual with someone else. The dynamic may be sexless, not the people/person. That was too hard a gut punch for them. They took it as an attack on their value as people. That had not been the intent. Refusing spouses commonly refuse spouses who move on to wildly happy relationships/marriages within a year. A poll here said >70%


Login Issues (no longer an issue)

When I log on to ILIASM, sometimes the site just will not finish login, or it takes an ungodly amount of time.

It may already have logged you in, it just isn't presenting the home page to you. It's stuck.

Click the Refresh button. (It may be an X because it thinks it's loading, just click it once to stop loading, then again to refresh.)

This makes arrival at ILIASM go much faster.