Important information ( Future Update )

[The Saint]

Dear ROAC Members,
We all love our cars, more so, showing them off at shows and events. Many of which this club has organised. The team behind the club all work very hard and put many long hours in making sure that there is something for everyone, from helping to find parts, advise, local meets, sales and general “taking the P” out of each other! I for one have found this club a lifesaver in its resources and help in my A610 restoration.
We all try to be apart and hopefully put back into the club a little something to help it stay alive. Mr Dell has been the backbone of this club for many many years, and with our support he has just about managed to keep it running.
But like most clubs we need to keep this alive, and show others that we are a family as well as a group of Alpine Addicts.
To help Mr Dell with the running of the club, we have taken up the challenge to encourage as many of you that are registered on the web site, to become members and give back a little to the club.
In the next few days, or even a week or so… depending upon the response I get from you guys, as well as some membership data from Mr Dell, we will be deploying a new re-vamped web site. To take away some of the stress of getting subscriptions, the new site will have an automated membership system. You can renew or join on-line and have access to many new services, and I encourage you to sign up, and help us to maintain this site and club.
As always we still have a free non-member section that you can register, within the same area, but you will have some restrictions, like water marked gallery pictures…
As most members know, the club membership is due each year, depending upon Mr Dell’s well-being and health to remind us all to renew. This quite often falls to the side and he often gets distracted and forgets. This means someone has to pay for such things like the servers for the web site and club event bookings etc etc.. You get the picture!!!!
So with this in mind, when the new site is published, it will be asking for renewals. I hope this does not offend anyone, but nothing in life is free. I now ask of those that have paid for a membership within a year of today’s date, that you send me a message so I can add you to the server as being paid, that way, when the site is published, you will retain your membership. I will also have this data from Mr Dell to cross check, but again I really don’t want to give him more work.
Please do not hassle Mr Dell with this, as I am trying to take some workload from him. If you find yourself as a non-member, once the new site is active, then please message me, and I will sort it.
Thanks for your understanding
Vince..

This is all good Vince what i saw of the new web stuff at Prescott on Saturday was great.Just want to start using it
P.S Paid up Feb 2014

Yep seconded there Vince, all good.

Mine's actually expired (I just sent you a PM) so as soon as this is active I will get it refreshed.

pm sent.

[The Saint]

Hi all,
Just a quick update, from looking at the replys I have already.

This is just a polite notice of what we are intending to do in the next few days to a week. IF your membership has already expired, then I advise you wait for the new update, as the site will give you all you need to renew, there is even a link to use Paypal, then next year the system will remind you a month before it runs out and then again a week. If you don't then renew, it warns you a week after and then makes you a standard non-member.. but even after that, you can still renew.. so no need to panic!! you will not be kicked out or anything...

This will take time to move and change over all, as not everyone logs in on a regular basis.. so no need to panic...

Thanks again to all members for their support.

Vince..

[SuperSean]

Hi All.
I thought it might be time for a quick introduction and update on what will hopefully be happening soon.
My name is Sean, I'm from Melbourne Australia and while don't have an Alpine, as some of you may already know I have been working behind the scenes assisting Vince in updating the website.

Hopefully over the next week, we will be pushing out an update to the website that we have been working on for a couple of months now. In that time, Vince and I have monitored the current site and listened to a few of your comments about whats working and whats not. As a result, we have come up with a solution to what we believe address most of these issues.
'
Firstly, the site will be given a brand new look.
The forums will be promoted to the front page of the site, allowing you to get quicker access to the discussions and information that you want, while retaining most of the current galleries, Tech Manuals, Car Histories etc.
This will be done by applying a new template to the site. This template will be natively reactive - fancy geek talk meaning that it will automatically reconfigure its layout based on the screen size of the device you are viewing it on.
This means that you will no longer need to use the third party 'tapatalk' application to access the forums. If you are a tapatalk user however, this does not mean that you will not be able to use it, we will continue to support tapatalk and in fact we also plan on updating the tapatalk service to the newest version.

User Galleries
As part of the upgrade, each user will have a personal gallery they can upload images to and manage them into albums.
All of the current Galleries (including current 7600+ images already on the site) the have already been converted, and new galleries are now much easier to create and maintain.

Memberships
The optional Club memberships mentioned by Vince above will be automated with payments of fees going directly to Steven via PayPal.
This system will also automatically send out reminders when your membership is due and, you will also have the option to pay for one year or setup a yearly subscription that will automatically debit your PayPal account every year allowing you to simply set and forget (of course you will be able to cancel that subscription at any time).

Digests
Digests will send you an email daily, weekly, or monthly (depending on your preference) with an update on conversations that you have missed since your last login. Optionally you can also choose what forum sections you want included, or even have your PMs attached if you choose. Of course you can also opt-out of these emails should you choose.

Similar Posts
The Similar Posts feature will add links on the bottom of each page to relevant topics similar to the one you are currently viewing, allowing you to easily navigate around areas of the forums that you may not otherwise have looked in.
This should be most useful to newer members, or when you are looking for information on a specific topic.

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This brings us up to What I call Milestone 1 of the site updates. Once these features are deployed, we will continue to monitor the forums to look for areas where improvements need to be made or bugs need to be splatted while we continue to work on some other features that we have in mind.

As i said earlier, we are hoping to have these features pushed out within the week and will advise you of down times a couple of days in advance for these planned updates.

Sean.

All sounds like a real step forward and should be a real help to Stephen. Great work guys.

As above.. well done guys!

I'm new to this and intended to join to get access to some of the forums but joining seemed a bit of a pain filling out forms to post off so I still haven't bothered. I'll look forward to the new site and I'll join up then straight away - Good effort guys!

[The Saint]

Welcome Mr Sparkey,
Yes I know what you mean about posting and paperwork, It was the intention, to have a quick and easy registration.
We have been speaking with the president last night, finalising a few things before we go live. I can assure all, that this will be very soon.

Watch this space for announcements of down times of the present site, for the update.

Thanks Vince..

[The Saint]

ROAC members,
I would like to give you advanced notice, that we are going to upload the new site template, this sunday evening.
The site will be off-line from 20:00 (8pm) while we migrate the data from the development site to the live server.

During this time you will not be able to log in.


Thanks Vince..

[SuperSean]

I had some time to kill today, so I have pushed out part of the updates ahead of schedule.

You will now start to see a "Similar Topics" section at the bottom of each forum topic.
As i mentioned earlier, Similar Topics searches the forum and finds topics similar to the one you are currently viewing.

Also, if you go to your User Control Panel (UCP) you will see a new 'Digests" tab.
here you can select the options for the topics you want in the digests that the forum sends to your email.
The Default is to send them out weekly (on a Sunday) but if you want, you can also disable this feature.

The digests system is currently not enabled, so you will not actually receive any emails until the site is fully set up, but you can still check out the options and set your preferences before then.

[The Saint]

ROAC Members,
As you can now see, we have uploaded the new site template, This took a little longer that expected. As a result we have left the membership access as it was on the old site. If you have not paid your membership, you will find, in the next day or so, your access changed to a standard member. There may also be a few bugs. Please inform us of any issues.

You can upgrade your membership right now! on the link on the left hand side under membership options, select upgrade / renew membership, once you are logged in, if you so wish!

If you have any questions, please contact myself or SuperSean.

Well done!!!!

Amazing work.

Thank you so much.

[SuperSean]

Update on the Update

We have now pushed out the majority of the planned updates and are still working on finishing some areas.
These include -

• Tweaking general permissions levels
• Updating the members list
• Repairing a couple of broken links
• Putting back the technical manuals for Club Members
• Displaying Advertisements for non club members
• Adding a Classifieds section

There are a couple of new options in your User Control Panel.

You now have the ability to create and maintain personal photo albums. you will find the options for this under the Galleries section of the UCP
If you are a big boy and like using big words.. you can now select to disable the word censor (Thumbs up for Clee). This is a user option.. and can be accessed by going to the UCP > Board Preferences > Edit Display Options > Enable word censoring.
This option is enabled by default, but you can remove it and see all the glorious words you like should you choose. Those that opt to keep it enabled will continue to see the censored text.

As Vince mentioned above, you can now upgrade your club membership using the links on the left under Membership Options.

And lastly, Digests will be enabled later this week. Should you wish to opt-out.. you can do so at any time or of course you can go ahead and set up your personal preferences there too.