mawby Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 As some people haven't spotted all the new features yet, here's a quick overview of what the upgrade has given us. Forum Home Page Hopefully that's where you are reading this now. We were surprised by the number of people who missed important threads in the Club News & Membership forum, so we decided to add the forum home page which always shows the latest news threads, and also loads of other useful bits of information and shortcuts. This home page is highly configurable and we will add new features when I get a free moment! We hope to display stuff like the newest members garage and the newest technical article. Technical Articles This can be found as a sub-forum of the mkiv Technical forum and takes you here, where you can find the clubs technical articles. These are written by Ian C based on information found in the technical fourms. One problem with presenting technical information in the forum is you often have to skip posts that are off topic or simply wrong. By creating these articles we can ensure the information is easy to find especially for newbies. There is also the ability to add comments (members only) so if you spot a mistake or have something useful to add then you can do. Please remember that this is work in progress so it might look a little empty at the moment. Members Garage This can be found as a sub-forum of the Multimedia Gallery forum and takes you here, where you can browse pictures and details of members cars. If you are a club member then you can add your own car to the database by using the "Edit vBGarage" option in your user control panel. There is a slight problem with displaying certain pictures, please see this post for the solution. Time Slip Database This can be found as a sub-forum of the Supra Chat forum and will take you here, where you can browse details of members best drag racing runs. You can add your best drag time to the database by using the "Edit Time Slip" option in your user control panel. Downloads Members now have access to a Downloads area where you can download loads of Supra related material. Arcade Another treat for the paid up members is the Arcade where you can play some of the latest and classic arcade games and try and beat the high scores set by other club members. Affiliations This can be found as a sub-forum of the Club News & Membership forum and will take you here. This part of the site is where we will put up details of special offers the club has managed to source for its members. Go take a look, I'll first official affiliate is in there already! We have plenty more planned, it's just to the forum upgrade has taken priority over most other things. Events The calendar has been hacked to allow members to flagged if they are attending an event. This will prevent the need for long lists of names to be copied and pasted all over the place. When creating a calendar entry you need to select the "Use roll call" option if you want people to be able to flag themselves as attending. If you check out the Christmas Day event Rob created you'll see you can add yourself to the list of people attending as a demonstration. RSS Feed This allows forum posts to be read in your RSS reader. Simply point your RSS reader at http://www.mkivsupra.net/vbb/external.php?type=rss. As easy as that! IRC Chat We decided to create an official club IRC room given that IRC is the oldest and probably most well supported internet chat around. You can access the room via the navigation bar option above, or you can connect to it via your own IRC client using the following details... Server: irc.eu-irc.net Port: 6666 Room: #mkivsupras IRC URL: http://irc://irc.eu-irc.net:6666/mkivsupras Memberships The old system for membership activation and status involved us doing everything manually, even when you paid your membership via PayPal or Nochex we had to manually confirm the payment and then activate your account. However, now we've upgraded the forum things can change. Firstly, new members currently have 25 free posts, at which point their title will change to "Membership Due". Once they hit 40 posts the forum will now automatically move new members into the "Membership Expired" group without us doing anything. Secondly, if you look in your "User CP" you'll see a new option called "Paid Subscriptions". From here you can automatically pay your club membership via PayPal or Nochex and the forum will handle everything. Us moderators will not need to get involved in the process unless something goes wrong. The main advantage of this is the forum will automatically update your subscription as soon as you've paid, giving you access to club members only forums straight away without having to chase us. Also, when the subscription has ended it will automatically move you into the "Membership Expired" group, again without us needing to get involved which will save us massives of time not having to deal with user group admin duties. Currently only the PayPal account is up and working in this fully automatically method. The Nochex one will follow shortly. We will also try and find some way of getting bank tranfer working in this method if it is possible. Now this leaves us with three things we need to do to get all the club members ready for the automated system to take over. 1) Move any newbie with more than 40 posts into the expired group. This was thankfully automatically done by the forum within an hour of upgrading. 2) We have to move members whose membership has currently expired into the expired group. 3) We have to manually subscribe members who's subscriptions are still current to the 'new' process so that they automatically get flagged up as expired when their membership runs out. Once finished you should find the whole membership side of the club is much easier to understand. As I said in another post, if you find you can't post for a few minutes then please don't worry, it is just the manual moves taking place, but if it lasts for more than an hour and you think your membership should be valid then please let me know. Please note that these changes will be done over the next few weeks, so there is no need for everyone still owing their membership fee to pay straight away as this will more than likely bring the PayPal account to it's knees! Please wait until your user title becomes membership expired and then pay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted December 25, 2004 Share Posted December 25, 2004 i missed loads of important threads 'cause they wrent' put in my facde. this is good that you are doing! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted December 25, 2004 Share Posted December 25, 2004 oooh i didn't see it all but I just saw RSS Thread reader thing and I use Firefox and RSS is frigin cool if u have firefox! wirkec Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted December 28, 2004 Author Share Posted December 28, 2004 Phase 2 of the membership update has been completed, and all those whose memberships had expired have now been updated as such. Because that involved over 200 of you and I doubt you've all read this, I've changed the expired group permissions so you can still post in the General and Traders forums, but not in Technical or members only. So if you can't post that is probably why. Please see the first post for details of how to pay as you can now do it automatically from the user cp, which is the quickest way to do it. What ever you do, DO NOT REREGISTER JUST SO YOU CAN POST! Phase 3 will be started tonight but will probably take me a couple of days, so please bear with us. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted December 28, 2004 Author Share Posted December 28, 2004 Phase 3 has been completed. Sorry for having to close the forum whilst doing it but it was much quicker that way. Please remember that I am only human, and as this was a 100% manual process there is a big chance I've made a mistake somewhere along the line. If your account isn't correct for some reason then please PM me and I will fix ASAP. Your patience with this is much appreciated at this festive time of the year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted December 28, 2004 Share Posted December 28, 2004 y'know what dude, just as you shut down the board I was hitting 'Submit thread' on a post that said "cool, but I can't see when my subscription expires!!" nice one p.s. check this out - not sure if this is specific to firefox or if it's newly introduced, but it's the first time I've noticed it. http://www2.css-networks.com/layout.jpg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted December 28, 2004 Author Share Posted December 28, 2004 ok I'll install firefox again and see what I can do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted December 29, 2004 Author Share Posted December 29, 2004 Affiliations This can be found as a sub-forum of the Club News & Membership forum and will take you here. This part of the site is where we will put up details of special offers the club has managed to source for its members. Go take a look, I'll first official affiliate is in there already! We have plenty more planned, it's just to the forum upgrade has taken priority over most other things.We have our second affiliation! More to come soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted January 4, 2005 Author Share Posted January 4, 2005 Phase 2 of the membership update has been completed, and all those whose memberships had expired have now been updated as such. Because that involved over 200 of you and I doubt you've all read this, I've changed the expired group permissions so you can still post in the General and Traders forums, but not in Technical or members only. So if you can't post that is probably why. Please note that the forum permissions for expired users will be reset soon! So if you haven't renewed your membership already then please do so or you'll no longer be able to post. Details of how to renew can be found here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Whitelightning Posted January 14, 2005 Share Posted January 14, 2005 Mawby, The only way I can get to the vbGarage is through the link you have made in your original post above. Is there another way from the main entrance ? If not - can you add it to the quick links menu ? That would be great. Many thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted January 14, 2005 Author Share Posted January 14, 2005 There's a link in the Multimedia Gallery. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Whitelightning Posted January 14, 2005 Share Posted January 14, 2005 Ah yes - so there is - can we have it on the quick links too ? Lovely Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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