Dates
Dates should be in the form mm/dd/yyyy. If you do not know the exact date and do not want to approximate, other acceptable formats are mm/--/yyyy or --/--/yyyy.
Ages should be entered in months. If you wish to report an age of 2 1/2 months, enter it as a decimal (2.5)
Survey Responses
From page 4 on, this survey asks detailed questions about many health conditions. Most dogs will not have most of these conditions so the survey has default answers of "No". You should check each category of question on each page (The categories are listed at the top of each page). For most dogs you need simply to check the defaults for correctness and press the continue button.
Should you come to a page where you have reportable health conditions but you do not have all the answers at hand, you can close your browser without submitting the page. When you return to the survey, your home page will display that dog's name with an incomplete status. When you click on that dog's name, you will return to the page where you quit. NOTE - This option is only available to those owners who created a profile.
You can not go back to previous pages to change answers.
This survey attempts to use logic to alert you to contradictory answers (for example leaving the answer to "Is this dog alive today" as "Yes" and then reporting that it was euthanized). However, the survey is long and complicated and not all situations can be examined. Please carefully read those sections where you must make non-default responses so that the data you submit is the best possible.
Passwords
Should you lose your password, it can not be recovered by anyone. The passwords are stored in encrypted form. If you contact the database administrator, he can assign you a new password which you can then change to one of your own choosing.
For your own protection, please use a password that is secure. Hackers use programs that run through a dictionary of common passwords in seconds. It is amazing how many people use a password of "password" or "9999" One simple method of creating a fairly secure password is to select a word or phrase that is meaningful to you, randomly capitalize it and add special characters. Then take a number which has significance and insert it in the word or phrase. For example, my dog's name is Millie and my fire number is 14202 and so I might make up a password of miL14202li!E (The exclamation point after the i is easy to remember). A password should be at least 8 characters long and a length of 12 or more is much better
More information on creating strong passwords can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx