Topic: New Combined Public and Members Forum!

[Scott Doyle]

Welcome to the new AFTE Forums!  The public and member forums are now combined into one forum.

As a registered member you will have access to all of the forums.  Visitors, non-members, and un-registered members will only see the public forums.

So that means as a member you cannot browse the member forums unless you register.

Why the big change?  (I know you are wondering this) Well, there are several reasons.

The old system used two separate systems which means twice the space used and twice the administration.  Consolidating these will bring everything under the same roof.

The old system while it looked good was pretty slow.  With the AFTE site template wrapped around the forum it was sometimes pretty slow to load.

The new system should be much faster.  The software uses a MySQL database for storing all of the information.

And lastly, the forum doesn''t have to reside in the Member''s Area.  You members won''t have to login to the members area and then login to the forum too.  Believe it or not this has been the biggest issue with the Member''s Message board.  Members had trouble understanding that the two systems were separate and each required their own login.  (Big headache for the webmaster!).[/list:u]

I''ve been working on this for 2 days and I''ve been able to migrate all members data and posts to this new system.  Members will need to login and if necessary have the system email them their password.  Or, email me and I''ll help you through the transition.  Some of the Emoticons have to be added by me but I''ll get to that too.

Unfortunately I''ve not been able to migrate any of the posts from the Public Forum to this new system.  It was either one or the other and we had over 1800 posts in the members forum opposed to 318 in the Public Forum.  When time permits I will try to copy and paste some of the important forum posts from the Public Forum to this one.

If you have made a post to the Member''s Area Forum in the last 24 hours it probably won''t be here and you can copy and paste it to this one if you don''t mind.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

I''ll be tweaking this message board over the next few weeks.  I hope to add a calendar function to it and if you can think of other features you want let me know.

For spell checking your posts I recommend you download an application at

http://www.iespell.com.  This little browser plug-in will let you spell check your posts in the message window just like in WORD.

The old forums will be up for a while during the transition but I would not recommend you post any more messages to them.

If anyone has any questions feel free to email me.

Thanks,