Cooltribe is the number 1 social networking website with a green/ethical conscience. It offers the following functionality to all its members:

• To connect with link-minded people who share the same vision and see beyond their own immediate self interests
• To join, form global or local groups/tribes and set actions
• To share experiences, advice and views
• To share pictures
• To load videos
• To read our daily news
• To participate in our daily topic discussion
• To take our daily action challenge
• To rate/vote and comment on published news and all other content
• To submit news
• All of the above is 100% free

Cooltribe is a self-regulated community. From green issues to fair trade, users gain/learn from each other and benefit from the user-generated content based on experience and expertise. We dedicate ourselves to making the world cooler.

Becoming a member couldn't be easier and it's 100% free. Click on "join now" and simply fill in the requested information. If the registration is successful, you will then receive an email confirming all relevant details.

Once you have registered, you are ready to take advantage of all the functionality provided by Cooltribe:

• connect with like minded people
• make friends
• join or create a group/tribe
• share experiences
• give advice and views through the blog facility
• share your pictures and load up your videos
• read our daily news
• participate in the daily topic discussion of the day
• take our daily action challenge

If you have a problem registering, please email: technical@cooltribe.com

Anyone above the age of thirteen is permitted to join our community. Once a member of our Cooltribe community, you have a responsibility to all parties within that community to use the Service for its intended purpose, as well as to act responsibly and respect the rights of all other Members and Users. Please read the terms and conditions for more details of users and members' rights and responsibilities.

Building your profile is a very important aspect that will enable you to make the most of the Cooltribe community. Your profile summarises who you are and what you stand for. Including your picture is always great as new friends like to see who they will be communicating with.

Building your profile is extremely straight forward. Once you have registered as a member, you will be able to access your profile page. Enter the information in the requested fields (use the tooltips to help), then just click on the save button.

Cooltribe likes to reward its members for their activities within the community. To keep with the tribal theme of the site, the following indicators have been created. As a member, you can become a leader, messenger, writer, reporter, wiseman or chief. You can either gain one indicator, a combination of indicators or even all of them. These indicators are technically calculated from the database daily, based on the activity over the last 30 days.

Someone who has shown special skills as a tribe leader acquires this indicator. A good tribe leader not only creates new tribes, but also takes strong participation in the tribes' activity, providing valuable topics for discussion and having a growing members' base.

A messenger actively leaves comments and feedback on the content of the site. The indicator is acquired by giving a number of comments that have been relevant and appreciated by other members.

A writer shares his thoughts with other members of the Cooltribe by writing and publishing blog posts continuously. A good writer could also try his luck with suggesting New and Act Now articles.

Cooltribe News and Act Now articles are written by Cooltribe editors. A reporter is someone who suggests interesting articles for publishing. A reporter can become an editor, if the Chief decides so.

All members of Cooltribe can comment on the content items, but are all the comments relevant? Somebody whose comments constantly receive positive votes and are strongly appreciated within the community becomes a Wiseman.

Beware, every community has a supervising eye, the Administrator, the Chief who carries most responsibility, knows most secrets, has an opinion for everything and yet is one of us!

A tribe is essentially a group. A group is a set of users who share common interests.

From the moment of registration and to help you get started, you will automatically be joining two groups: our "Cooltribe support tribe" and "Tribe talk". "Cooltribe support tribe" is run by established members who will answer any queries you may have and guide you through the community. "Tribe talk" is a daily discussion group/tribe that ensures the community keeps communicating and as a result, keeps evolving. You will therefore be able to make new friends, participate in our discussion of the day and share with us your experiences.

To join other groups/tribes, you will, first of all, have to select which one you would like to join. When you find the group/tribe you are looking for, click on the "join tribe" link. Some tribes might be by invitation only as they might be targeted at closed/defined groups of people. For example, a specific school, club, etc.

To find a group/tribe you want to join, just view the list of featured groups. If there is no group/tribe that shares your interest in the featured groups/tribes, you can also type in a keyword for the group/tribe you want to find and specify that you are looking for a group/tribe.

You can join as many groups/tribes as you want.

Each group/tribe has a join it and leave it link. If you want to leave a group/tribe, simply press on the "leave tribe" link.

The option to create a group/tribe can be found on the groups/tribes page. Click on the "create a tribe" link and start. You will then be asked to provide information that describes your group/tribe, please take time to fill in the fields required. You can also create a tribe by accessing your profile page.

An album is a number of pictures which you have grouped together and that relates to the same subject. For example, you can create an album related to your holiday and another album related to a hobby. Albums belong to either a member or a tribe/group. An image within the album can be assigned/linked to several albums. Please note that when deleting an album, you will delete all images within this album unless the image has been linked to some other content items, a blog for example.

To create a personal album go to the "Albums" section in your profile pages and click on the "Create a new Album" link. Once you fill in and save all the required information, you will be able to upload images to the album. Note, you can also add to the album images that you have uploaded to Cooltribe before and used for example in other albums or content. Preferably try to avoid uploading same image to Cooltribe several times, and always check the image is not already in your image pool.

To create an album within a tribe, make sure your are a member of the tribe, then go to the "Albums" section of the tribe and click on the "Create a ne Album" link. Create the album and upload the images as described above. Note, not all tribes allow creating albums, so you might not find the link. In that case contact the tribe moderator for more information. A tribe might also not allow creating new albums, but allow for adding images to the existing albums.

As many as you want.

Cooltribe does not provide the functionality for uploading actual video files to the site. Instead Cooltribe enables embedding YouTube videos into the content items, such as blogs and news, or directly into "My videos" or "Tribe videos".

To embed a video, find and open your video on YouTube and copy the URL reference that you can find in the grey box on the right hand side. On Cooltribe, click on "Add video". Irrelevant of whether you are writing a content item, adding a video to the tribe or your own collection, you will get the same popup with a form. Paste your YouTube URL reference there, fill in all the other required information and save.

Tags are an index of all the content on Cooltribe. They are keywords that members use to mark all their content like their groups/tribes, their videos, their blogs, and photos. They are a substitute to a search category, definition parameter or a link to a particular item. News items, discussion items and other content is tagged.

Tags are added in the process of creating/adding/editing each content item. Tags are saved and presented in a lower case throughout the portal/system.

Amount of tags per content items is restricted to 5. The only exception is the member tags, where these are collected from the following profile information:

• Country
• City
• Interests
• Favourite movies
• Favourite books
• Favourite celebrities
• Display name

Please note that tags can be edited through editing the content item.

You can add up to five tags that best illustrate and describe your piece of content.

Cooltribe allows searching content items by tags only. The search will return content items of all types:

• Blog posts
• News articles
• Act Now articles
• Members
• Images
• Videos
• Discussions
• Tribes

A search can include multiple tags. The results page will only return exact matches.

As a registered member of Cooltribe you are able to write your own blog.

To write a new post go to the "Blog" section within your profile pages and click on the "Write a new Blog" link. You can write a blog post and leave it unpublished if you prefer to return to it for another revision. Unpublished posts will remain hidden from other Cooltribe users. You can find your unpublished posts at the bottom of the "Blog" section of your profile pages.

When the post is published, it becomes public and is accessible both from your profile pages and the main "Blog" section of the site.

Blogs come in all shapes and sizes. You can do whatever you want with your own blog. It can be a place where you keep a daily green journal. Or you can make it more interactive, posting green discussion topics and inviting comments and dialogue. Use your blog to post information that interests you, and that you think might interest others..

You can edit your images, albums, blog posts and videos.

First of all access the item you want to edit by clicking on the corresponding tab in your profile page (for example, if you want to edit a video, click the video tab under your Profile section).

Once the corresponding tab is showing, click on the item you wish to edit.

You will find displayed on the right hand side of the item, a CooltTools section where an editing option is shown. Press on the editing option.

You cannot edit comments your give to the content items or discussion topics.

You cannot edit "News" and "Act Now" articles you suggest to the Cooltribe editor.

If you wish to make changes to any content that you cannot access directly, please contact the Administrator.

In essence, active tribes cannot be deleted. In case a moderator wants to delete a tribe, he must first contact the Cooltribe Administrator. The tribe will then be reassigned to either another tribe member or the Administrator.

Comments can not be deleted. Once you have written a comment, it stays. However, comments that receive five or more negative votes appear as collapsed.

A member who has submitted a News or Act Now article can not delete that article. Essentially Cooltribe holds the rights for the News and Act Now articles once they are submitted for revision. However, if you find some article being fully irrelevant or incorrect you can contact the Administrator directly and suggest removing it.

Yes, blogs can be deleted.

Yes, videos can be deleted.

Images are potentially linked to various items on the site. Deleting an image from one item, in fact only removes the association of that image with the item but the image remains in the database as long as it is linked to other items. For example, if an image features both in the blog post as well as in one album, deleting the blog post with its image will not delete the image from the album. However if an image is only associated to the blog and no other content, deleting the blog with its image will permanently delete the image from the Cooltribe database.

A member can leave the Cooltribe community and ask the Administrator for his account to be deleted. The member will be removed from the database as well as his albums, videos. His groups will be reassigned. Comments, news items and pictures related to news items will not be deleted but instead reassigned to an anonymous author.

Cooltribe is a self-regulated community so we rely on you to tell us if someone is using offensive language and report any sort of unacceptable behavior.

Any comments found abusive, offensive, or irrelevant to the context can be given a negative vote (thumb down) and at receiving a certain amount of negative votes will appear as collapsed.

Content items themselves (images, videos and blogs) can be reported as spam by clicking on the link "Report as spam" that can be found on the full page view right next to the tags. It is then the Administrator's responsibility to revise these items, return them to the site or remove if reporting found reasonable.

Don't worry. Simply click on the "Forgotten Password" link at the very top right corner of the page. You will then be asked to provide your email address. Confirm by clicking on "Reset password." We'll send you an email with your new password.

Yes, we do.

We believe it is important we explain to the community our thoughts on the subject of advertising. First of all, we are not in receipt of public funding and therefore we are self-financing the Cooltribe site and its applications and as a result we can provide free service to all our members.

We will allow advertsing on Cooltribe as we strongly believe it helps fulfill a number of objectives:

• To allow companies, who are producing/distributing/marketing and promoting in general low carbon emissions and ethical products and services, to showcase these products and services.
• To allow You, the member, to get to know about these products/services and give you choices when purchasing.
• To enable You, the member, to comment online on any of the advertised products/services. There will be a rating system where you are free to rate a tried product/service.
• To enable us to pay our bills and maintain the services we provide you for free and to develop new applications useful to our community.

Advertising on Cooltribe will not be allowed initially but will be allowed at a later stage. We believe in focusing initially on our community and providing content and applications to our members.

Thank you for your comprehension.

We allow companies and individuals who want to promote the environmental/ethical credentials of their products and services. We believe it is important to acknowledge companies on their low carbon emission journey and we hope that these companies and individuals will show the way to others. We remind you that we are not an accredited body and therefore we are not in a position to verify the environmental claims made by the businesses listed. We rely on self regulation. However, prior to companies listing their products/services with us, they are having to answer a set of questions about their environmental/ethical activities.

Cooltribe management team has taken the decision to focus on our community first and provide the services our community requires to communicate with like-minded people around the world. The advertising will be introduced at a later stage.

Advertising on Cooltribe is not yet available as we have decided to initially focus on building our community. It will however be allowed at some time in the future. If you need additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us at advertise@cooltribe.com.