Just joined or completed New Member Orientation and can't connect? READ THIS!

[Don Desfosse]

If you recently joined, have you completed the New Member Orientation Program?

• Before you are able to log onto the online VATSIM servers, you must review the New Member Orientation Course and then pass a short exam. After successfully passing the exam, your account status will become active, and normally within one hour after passing the exam, you may log on.
• If you are looking for your New Member orientation, please login to my.vatsim.net and click on the link that is shown immediately after login.
• If you are looking for your New Member exam, please login to my.vatsim.net and look toward the bottom of the menu on the left for the "My Exams" menu item. The exam will be available for retake one hour after any unsuccessful attempt.

If you have completed the New Member Orientation Program, but still cannot log on:

• We operate with a network of distributed servers, so it can normally take up to an hour for new/updated membership information and credentials to be passed to all servers. Within the first hour after completing your New Member Orientation, reactivating your account, or a password change, if your preferred server rejects your credentials, you are welcome to keep trying different servers until finding one that will work.  Normally within one hour (often much less), you should be able to connect to your preferred server (usually best to connect to a server closest to your location).  The servers are all interconnected, so all traffic and connections may be seen regardless of which server you connect to

 

We say this 5 times during the registration process...  And for those that miss it those 5 times and think about changing their password, it is the ONLY note on the password reset page, big, right in the middle, in a big blue box so no one could should possibly miss it....  And it's listed in multiple places on the Member Help page....  And it's listed in the Member Support Knowledgebase and FAQ....  We have really gone out of our way to publish this information many times in many places so people will hopefully read and understand it!!!

Hope this helps!!!

[Don Desfosse]

Update:  Recent improvements have dramatically minimized the time between server synchronizations.  As a result, though we used to advise that it could take up to 24 hours for the server synchronizations to complete, our new guidance is now "normally up to an hour".  Great news for our members enthusiastic to get online!