Thank you everyone. Keep the ideas coming too. Though as they say in the Mainland (cheese ad) "good things take time".
I've been finding it quite amazing the number of challenges I'm bumping into with the web and forum stuff, and all due to things being a bit overdue for some TLC really. But we're getting there...
I have deleted 11,500 spam-bot forum registrations. In the process I inadvertently deleted about 3 real folk who later contacted me asking why they could no longer log in...
There are still about 1,000 bogus forum users in there but I'm at the point now where it's extremely difficult to weed them out without hurting the real users. This is largely a factor of us still using an obsolete version of phpBB. Grrrr...
I have tried to implement a mod to prevent spam bots from registering in the first place... only to discover this breaks the ability to register on the forum at all... I can only assume that if the phpBB2 users out there rave over the mod but when I follow the install instructions to the letter it results in a breakage on our forum, then there must be something tweaked somewhere in one of the hundreds of files that make our forum tick, which prevents success... Groan.
To implement a lot of cool stuff such as uploading images directly to the forum, or preventing bogus registrations, requires upgrading the forum to phpBB3. But as John Howell pointed out to me the "Garage" module, which is a 3rd-party pluging he used, was never developed by its author to be compatible with phpBB3. Therefore you can't upgrade the forum because the upgrade breaks... So we will probably need to ditch the Garage... or it may not even be that simple anyway...
I discovered that about 1/2 the space we had used on the WCN server was actually email stuck in the club's default email account. And that the WCN system wanted to crash on me ever time I tried to delete it. And their support folk never answered my requests for help - which turned out to be due to a crisis there, as their IT guy quit. So understandable. I eventually managed to delete all that garbage email, and then set up the WCN's anti-spam measures for that account, so as to prevent it happening again.
That exercise consumed several evenings, but got it to the point where I can actually make a backup of the club's web site and forum. Whew!
But getting it done meant I was able to up the PM storage to 100, so we can keep track of our conversations a bit better. Still not ideal, but I've certainly found it helps, as an AC, to keep track of stuff a bit better.
Last weekend when deploying the site I discovered the WCN server's software is too old so I had to suss how to make what I'd built backwards compatible to get it to work... Hmmmm.....
Anyway, long story short, it's proving challenging. But rewarding.
I would encourage all the ACs to take a good look at the site, and if they think that a newbie visiting mr2.org.nz might feel they'd discovered something of interest, then please place an ad in your local rag with the club's web address and hopefully you'll find yourself with some new folk to deal with... That's my plan anyway.
Nothing would give me more of a buzz than to know that the time I'm investing in the club's web site and forum was really worthwhile.
If ACs around the country are able to use the results of my efforts to help attract new members and thus to help grow the club in their regions, I'll be utterly stoked. Cos that's the whole point of the exercise.
OK, back to it. Cheers folks.
