Quick note on school emails and registration

[Chaos he/him]

If you are trying to register and don't receive a validation email, it is possible your mail server is outright rejecting 17th Shard's emails. This has happened a few times, where people try to use the Contact Form, and I have had both my 17S email get rejected, as well as my regular Gmail. Essentially, if this is happening to you, your school administrators have heavily locked down your school email address.

Please remember school / organization email addresses are monitored. They will restrict these to educational/organization purposes. In addition, when you eventually are not a student, you will often lose access to your school email address very quickly. (At the college I teach at, a student would lose their Gmail after a semester of not taking classes.) This means you will be locked out of many accounts if you use to register for many sites. For these and many other reasons, we do not recommend you use such emails for personal accounts. It is free and easy to register for a Gmail account, or Outlook account, or any number of other free services, like Proton.

To the teens on 17th Shard: I cannot emphasize enough the importance of registering a personal email account that you will keep for years. If I could make a suggestion, I would also recommend you choose an email address that sounds professional, and that you will not be ashamed to give to potential employers or other official things. I say this as a person who needs to convert from my dorky "Chaos" email address to something more professional near the end of college, particularly when it's connected to tons of accounts (and in my case, Google Docs). I know that sounds far away, but it'll happen faster than you assume! 

If you would like to maintain anonymity online (which is a very wise idea), register a more professional-sounding email and use it for some purposes, and then have a pseudonym for things like 17th Shard/Reddit/Discord. 

Anyway, that's just a PSA for the day. Thanks for reading!