Forum confusion

I love the way these forums are run and organized, but it was quite difficult to get involved. Here's why:

I created an account on Design Contest a while ago, but only recently returned to become more active. I signed into my account and began submitting designs again without issue. I came to post in forums, and the top of my screen still stated that I was logged in, but I couldn't do anything on the forums. There was no option to reply, post, or anything. I was frantically looking around everywhere I could to find a solution, and I feel like I would have given up after quite a bit of time I had put in to searching had I not really wanted to participate.

I was afraid that I had missed something important when creating my account that had locked me out from the forums, and the only clue I could find was a the bottom of select threads there were sometimes notifications saying something along the lines of "1 person browsing this page (0 members, 1 guest)."

Eventually, when reading a forum that I was genuinely interested in, I happened to accidentally stumble upon a reply with quote function. I tried using it since it was the only option I was given, then it took me to a page that said I needed to log in or register. It still said I was logged in at the top, but I entered my information into the box as well, and it signed me into the forums separately.

There was never any option to log into the forums separately, but, I don't know if it was because I was on a new computer or what, it still mandated me to do so, but gave me no place to do it.

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TL;DR You have to sign into the forums separately from the main site, but there is no way to do so.

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A log in feature, or a notification saying that you are logged into the site but not the forums would help quite a bit, and it took me quite a while to solve this issue and I want this to be avoidable in the future.

This is a great site and runs smoothly; thank you for your time.

Issue was fixed with new forum.