How can I become a XIHA Life member?

XIHA Life membership is open for everyone and free of charge. Click here to register now. You need to be over 13 years of age and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. It's as simple as that!

Membership is free, huh? Seriously?

Yes! XIHA Life gets revenue from advertisements and game sales so we're able to offer membership services totally free. If you like our website, the best way to support us is by contributing to the website - post to the forum, write blogs and upload photos! XIHA Life membership will always be free. We may later offer some extra services for a small fee but even in that case the basic features will always be free.

How can I get free games?

There are couple ways to get free games at XIHA Life. First of all, everything you do on the website (writing blogs, posting on the forum, uploading photos, even downloading games!) will earn you points. These points can be used to purchase games, according to these rules.

Another way to earn free games is our weekly competition - every week we pick one forum topic, blog or a photo album and award the author a free game! How to win? The material needs be original (in other words, made by you), of interesting topic and high enough quality. In case of text this means interesting content and easy to read, and in case of photos it means semi-professional quality images.

Keep in mind all our games are free to try and you even earn points for downloading them! Click here to go to the games section!

I have problems creating an account or logging in - can you help me?

If you have any issues creating an account or with the current account login, please use the contact form and send us a message. Please be as specific as you can; tell us your contact information, your operating system and web browser and describe what you are doing and any error messages you're getting.

I have difficulties uploading images to XIHA Life... what's wrong?

First of all, please make sure your image is one of the following supported formats: JPG, GIF or PNG. If the filename ends with any other extension, such as BMP or PSD, you won't be able to upload the image to XIHA Life. Second, check to see that the image is not too large. We don't have any practical limitations on the file size, but if the upload takes too long time the connection will likely timeout and the upload will fail. Also please note that while you can upload an image of any size, our server will resize overly large images to at most 1280 pixels wide and high. If you need help converting your images to correct format or changing the size, please download an easy to use and free software called Picasa from Google:

How can I add video to messages?

Adding video is really easy! Currently you can include any video clip from YouTube. Here's how it works:

Find out the YouTube id of the video you wish to post. This id is at the end of the website address of the video, when playing at the YouTube website. For example, let's say you web browser's address bar has the following url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-1aui-wluE ... in this case the ID is Q-1aui-wluE.

Write the following tag to any message, blog or your home page: [video:youtube,xxx] (replace xxx with the code)

That's it! Then click Preview to see how your message looks like with the embedded video and Post to publish it for everyone to see!

I want to see new forum posts since my last visit. How to do it?

Go to the [b]forum[/b] section using the tab at the top of the page. Now, below the navigation tabs you will see more options. You can choose to view all topics, recent replies, replies since the last login, your own topics and replies to your own topics. If you choose to view replies since last login, you will see a listing of all topics which had posts since your last login, with the new replies displayed below each topic. This is a powerful way to quickly browse through the discussions! Click here to see recent replies!

I lost my password, can you help me?

We're all human, it happens. Sometimes you misplace your keys, sometimes you forget your password. If that happens you can now click on the Forgot password? link on the left side panel, below the login buttons. Or you can just Click here.

To protect your privacy, we don't actually know what your password is and thus we can't send it to you. We save your password in an encrypted, scrambled form which is not human readable and it can't be converted back to the original form, so even if someone tried to break into our system they wouldn't be able to steal the passwords.

We give you an option to set a new password. You will need to enter your username and a new password, twice. We ask for the password twice because we want to be sure you didn't make any typing errors. We then send an email to you - we use the email address you gave us when you registered for the account. This email contains a link which you need to click (or copy to internet browser), in order to verify the password change request really came from you! You will only have 24 hours to verify, after which the link expires. You also can only use the service once per 24 hours in order to prevent system abuse.

There is a useful post on the forum regarding this subject: http://www.xihalife.com/bbs/home/1687.htm.

What are tags?

Tags are keywords which describe something, such as a photo or a blog. Tags are very important - with tags other people can find the stuff you post! This is especially important with photos as computer scripts understand only words, not the actual images. With no tags, it will be much harder for anyone to find your photos.

Tags are words, separated by space. If you want to use a tag consisting of more than one word, use double quotes around it. Here is an example of a set of tags for a photo taken in Los Angeles traffic jam:

city lights traffic jam "los angeles" cars

Using more tags is a good idea - just as long as they have something to do with the subject!

To enter tags to your photos, navigate to a photo page by clicking on it. Below the image you will see line which says Edit photo. Click on this line to reveal various photo edit options, including a line which says Tags.

It is a good idea to enter the photo title and description too, as these will make the photos much more interesting to other people, who might be wondering where they were taken or who is the subject. Not to mention it helps the search engines such as Google to find your beautiful creations!