Webmasters use membership of a domain for many different purposes.

• Access to "Member's Only" areas.

  For example a magazine might require membership to browse the library archive of stories for reading.

  Or, a graphics archive might require membership to download gifs and jpgs.

• Granting of permissions.

  Perhaps membership may be required to post content on a monitored chat forum.

  Or, perhaps only members can post stories to a writer's guild archive.

• Storage of information for the user.

  This could be something like storing the current adventure and status of an online game so that a player doesn't need to restart at the beginning each time.

Of course there are many other problems for which Membership can be an answer. The above should serve to point the direction.

There are many scripts available for membership management. The nature of the problem you are attempting to solve with membership will dictate how much security and monitoring you will require for your membership system.

An example of a simple membership package is used on this domain to manage the Adventure game storage.

• Click here to join
• Click here to login

The above are simple links used to access login and join. An alternative method for user login could be a small form on appropriate pages.