Dear visitors,
It is with mixed feelings that I announce the demotion and promotion of some of our staff members. Our site has gone through some changes and this means I have to adjust our staff setup. We require a close group of team members that are friends with each other and help each other out, that can be active, and can help move our site forward. Unfortunately, this means that together with a few promotions some people have to be let go too. This is done clean and in a friendly manner. I want to make sure everybody knows these staff members will still be valued members, close friends and that we have no problems with anybody. Hopefully they find the time to still be active on our forums as posters. Here are a few of the changes:
Administrators
Floris - (first) Administrator and owner of the web site.
mf - Shared (second) administrator and manager of the community.
Chroder - Shared (third) administrator and manager of the site.
Moderators
Disjunto - Main Community Manager - Staff member
Mephisteus - IRC Manager - Staff member
Pyro - News Forums / Premium Forums Manager - Staff member
ManagerJosh - vBulletin Forums / Premium Forums Manager - Staff member
Mr. Brian - General Forums / Customer Forums Manager - Staff member
Martin - Sister Site Content-Specific Forums Manager - Staff member
Robert - Members Manager / ProStyle Developer - Staff member
Of course, all staff members moderate all the forums, the managers are overlooking the staff and user actions and take appropriate actions where needed. All staff members are also moderators on all the vBFans Network sites. Job titles might shift over time, and we will try to announce them if we can.
The above changes mean we are demoting Martin from admin to staff member and restoring estaban's status to valued community member. The internship of Anthony has ended and due to time constraints Isis is unable to stay staff member; their accounts have been reset to valued community member too. Thank you all for your hard work, it was wonderful working together with you all and hopefully we can work together again in the future.
Recently we have tweaked some of our settings like the Karma system. We have fixed an annoying bug in 3.6.1 that showed the message 'you are banned' instead of 'you don't have permission' (thanks Freddie!) and we've upgraded our forum software to 3.6.1 after a short private beta test earlier that day (thanks Jelsoft). There have been quite some uproar about the content of our web site, missing forums and threads and where the new style is. Well, let me explain. We have all the forums and threads in our archive. We have over 500 forums stored in archive and are slowly returning them and restoring their threads. This process takes a lot of permissions checking and as we deal with 5+ web sites this might take a while as you can imagine. In the meantime we are improving the set up of our forums. New categories or sections have been added and content has been moved around. Hopefully in a few months from now we are done with it all and it is easier for everybody to work with. We thank everybody for their patience while we do our best to make our forums the best. The style is being developed, and with 3.6.1 being stable now we can soon complete it. The delays are simply time constrains; but don't let that fool you. I am working on the style on my localhost so when it is done it can run at once on all the sites. An example of such a heated discussion can be found here:
http://www.vbulletin-fans.com/showthread.php?t=22870 - together with more details about what is going no behind the scenes.
I have also received quite a few questions about the registration process on our site and the set up of our usergroups. We are still working on improving this for everybody, and hopefully we can finalize this in October. But here's an overview that will simplify it for everybody:
Guests: Can view all public forums and threads, but not all thread contents or attachments or any of the private forums. Guests can register for free on our site.
New Members: Users with 0 posts can participate in all the open discussions and are free to introduce themselves or start new discussions. Users with 0 posts can not always download attachments, or view content in certain private forums.
Returning Members: Users with more than one post can participate in almost every public discussions and can download attachments. And can view certain content in private forums. But not always participate.
Premium Members: Users who either purchased the professional style in the past, who purchased a premium membership (avaiable soon!) or who made over 250 posts .... can participate in the public forums AND the private forums. Our private forums are the premium forums. Users with premium membership automatically have access to our prostyle forums as well, which means that even if the style is not for sale, you can still get it! All our sponsors, advertisers and donators can request a free upgrade to the premium membership usergroup (contact Floris with a Privmsg)
Staff Members: All moderators, super moderators, administrators, interns and temporary moderators.
Before I go I would also like to give special thanks to dani & google & cj & patrick, and dragonflu.
Patrick - Our main sponsor, donating server space, traffic and support, professional hosting!
www.viper.uk.net
DragonFlu - Our IRC provider, offering great services, products and support to help our irc network stay alive and online.
www.acmeshells.com
Google - Our Advertising provider, offering adsense banners on various pages of our web site. Quality links, specific to the page you're looking at, making sure they are of your interest.
www.google.com/adsense
CJ - Affiliate provider, offering vbulletin banners for those interested in purchasing vbulletin,
www.cj.com
Dani - CGGal technical advertisement, we've had great support from daniweb over the last few months in the form of advertisements.
www.daniweb.com
And of course you: Our members, thank you for visiting our sites and signing up and posting. Helping our community to grow. I invite you to update your web site with a banner or text - link back to vbulletin-fans.com
That is it for now, I have to go back into the admin control panel and work on more improvements I just thought people would appreciate it to keep them updated with our changes.
Feel free to reply to this announcement, we've turned on the comment system
Floris & Staff
