As some of the users of this bulletin board may have noticed, the terminology for participation on this bulletin board have been modified. In an effort to build awareness and increase club membership, the user ranking titles have been updated to reflect whether a user is a paid ACMOC club member or a registered (non-paying) bulletin board user.

For the last few years, if you are in fact a paid-up ACMOC club member, your identifier has indicated "ACMOC Member" under your handle. If your dues have expired or you have never been a paid member to the club, your title had previously been one of three possible options: "Junior Member" with posts 0 through 29, "Member" with posts 30 through 99, and "Senior Member" with posts 100 and above. These titles have led to some confusion with some assuming that they are now members of the club. This is not true. Instead, these titles were to indicate you were a member of the community. Only dues-paying club members received the title "ACMOC Member."

Now, those who are dues-paying club members will still have the "ACMOC Member" nomenclature. Any other user who is not a paying club member will have the "Guest" moniker applied to your current bulletin board recognition title. Thus, anyone with 0 to 29 posts will be labeled "Guest Junior Member." Any user with 30 to 99 posts will be termed "Guest Member." Any user with 100 or more posts will be termed "Guest Senior Member." These titles may be changed in the future to better reflect the true nature of one's membership, but for now, if you see the word "Guest" in front of your title, you are NOT paying dues and are enjoying the benefits of this bulletin board for free.

Please understand that it costs money for us to run this forum and a lot of people take benefit from it. If you are a regular user and not an ACMOC member, you should really think hard about joining the club to support the cause. We rely on continued membership to bring these benefits to you. When you join, you not only will have your title upgraded to "ACMOC Member," but you will also receive a years worth of our great ACMOC Magazine. You also receive discounts on merchandise. Why wouldn't you join? There are several levels of membership with one-year and three-year options.

Follow this link to view membership purchase options. www.acmoc.org/store/index.php?dispatch=c...view&category_id=254

Paid member for years but it states guest.

This has been coming up from time to time.
If you have had multiple address's used in the past this is where the problem lie's.
The data base is basically grabbing the first email mail address for a member on the BB, if it is not the one associated with your ACMOC membership you are being marked as a Guest Member.
It is an fairly easy fix once the office is notified, I'll have them change your status back to member, they may contact you and ask which email you would like to be using.
If anyone else has had this happen contact the office either by email or telephone for a correction.

Andy

I have a question on the section down below "what's going on"
it lists the number of users, and gives the number of members and of guests---I am a guest member but am listed under members, so is there two different groups of guests??

"dpendzic" wrote:

I have a question on the section down below "what's going on"
it lists the number of users, and gives the number of members and of guests---I am a guest member but am listed under members, so is there two different groups of guests??

I believe it is because you make donations to ACMOC and do not get the magazine. You are bumped in manually because of your support of the club.

Thanks Roger--I would have never guessed that!!

Dan, I don't think it quite works the way Roger described.

B4D2 can correct me, he's the closest to this, but as I understand it:

The "What's Going On" section at the bottom of every page is driven by the standard v-Bulletin categories. Those categories are what used to drive our user tags below the handles before we modified them to reflect Club Membership.

v-Bulletin, the software that operates the bulletin board, recognizes someone as a "Member" if they have registered and validated their username. In the eyes of v-Bulletin, everyone who has a bulletin board handle and is able to post and view photos on the bulletin board is considered a "Member". v-Bulletin doesn't know anything about our Club or who is and who isn't a paying, true, Member of ACMOC.

At the request of the Board of Directors, we modified the v-Bulletin software and databases back in 2014 to have it look at our true ACMOC Membership list and add a little tag below the handle of each bulletin board user who is a true ACMOC Club Member saying they were a Member.

More recently, a few months ago, at additional direction from the Board of Directors, we further modified the v-Bulletin programming to have the tags (operator, power user, greenhorn, whatever those tags are which are driven by how much activity you have recently contributed to the bulletin board) modified so that non-ACMOC Members have the word "Guest" incorporated into those tags.

The Board made this change to help educate bulletin board users to the fact that the bulletin board is a service of the Club and if you really like it and want to support it, the best way is to join the Club, pay dues and help cover the bills to keep the bulletin board alive.

This programming change didn't affect many of the programming pieces of v-Bulletin. For example, that "What's Going On" section is still driven by the old v-Bulletin definition of Member. Anyone who is a validated user will be listed in that section if they are online. That section isn't currently affected by your statues as a Member or non-Member of ACMOC.

It would be ideal to have all sections of v-Bulletin harmonized and consistent, but unfortunately, the programming required would be prohibitively expensive. We have done the best we could to make the cheap and easy programming changes as requested by the Board and to make things as informative as possible for the community, but have forgone the more intricate, difficult changes which also might have a negative impact on the bulletin board users.

As an example, many people use that "What's Going On" section to see who's online, start offline chats and generally communicate. That section is very useful because everyone who is a registered user appears there. It would be much less useful if the many who are not ACMOC Members, but are regular contributors here didn't show up.

I hope this is helpful. I'm sure B4D2 can correct if I've got anything wrong and we're both happy to answer additional questions as necessary.

Pete.

Thanks Pete--I guess everything is a bit more complicated than the assumed face value, like the revenue from the ads and this sorting of membership. What do the guests listed in that section actually have access to on the forum?? Can it be answered in 2 sentences or less???

Probably can, but probably not by me!

Right now, guests pretty much have access to everything on the bulletin board.





One sentence, how's that?




O. K. I can't help myself.

Guests can see everything, except they can't view photos which are hosted on the site. They just see a dead link which says "attachment". They can't post anything until they register and select a handle and password. Once they do that, they can see photos and everything.

Guests can see photos which are hosted offsite, like those I post though. They just can't see the photos uploaded directly to here.

This is a topic of controversy for this Board and has been for previous Boards. Many advocate for restricting access and the ability to view content so that only ACMOC Club Members would be able to see certain things. Some want everything restricted, most seem to want to allow non-Members to post and contribute, but maybe restrict access to detailed information, like the parts supplier lists, maybe the technical library and maybe some other things to only ACMOC paid Members.

I have always advocated for keeping the bulletin board completely open, free and available to anyone on the internet. I feel strongly that this is now our front door, the way we engage people around the world and get them involved in the Club. If we start restricting access to certain of the content, we'll lose some of those connections. I also worry that the really engaging, enjoyable tone of the bulletin board will change if we start filtering it so that only those who pay can see and participate in everything. I'm just one voice though.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself and had to add more sentences.

Pete.

Thanks---glad you couldn't help yourself---that explains a whole lot more!

Dan