vBulletin 3.0 Gold Questions

[Child of the 7th Age]

I have several questions about features on the 3.0 upgrade.

First, when you click on a poster's profile, there is a designation to the right of the screen labelled "user options". When I tried to bring this up, it said the following:

Child of the 7th Age, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons........

At first, I assumed this was because I was looking at someone else's profile, but the same thing happened when I clicked on my own profile.

What are "user options" and should they be accessible to a poster?

Second, when I looked at the list of people online that appears at the bottom of the main forum page, I noticed that some of the posters had small green cross marks immediately after their names. What does this symbol mean?

Thank you....Child of the 7th Age