I suppose if we want to be very pedantic, the hub is not authenticating you as a person, of course, it is giving your web browser a special "cookie" which contains an authorization code (or "token") when the browser sends the correct credentials (i.e. username and password) to the server. When the browser makes subsequent requests for pages, this token is sent with each request. The hub checks the validity of this code in the "session" database table and determines what identity (i.e. "channel") is associated with that code. The cool thing about Zot is that this channel could be "local" to the hub or it may be a remotely authenticated channel whose private keys reside on an independent server. It then populates the necessary "observer" variable information and uses this to render the special BBcode and Comanche language variables specifically for the page visitor.