Although we still offer basic, Free membership, and Paying membership which entitles you to receiving our print magazine Pagoda World and our news letter, as well as full access to our technical manual, the membership system has been completely revamped on the new system.
A membership administrator needs to have SMF forum Administrator or Moderator status. Although most of the activities of the membership administrator have been automated, there are some things they still need to do.
This document describes these things and how the process works in general. Also refer to the general membership process and cycles.
Admin Manage Members
The main page for administrators is reached through button Admin and then menu item from the left, Members. Choosing that function opens a sub menu as shown here, with a table with all members. That table lists e-mail addresses, user names, real names and Full member status and Expiry dates. By clicking on a single member you go to their Profile page, where you can perform all of the member maintenance functions.
The top of the page has the following "Manage Members" functions:
View All Members, which just resets this list to show all members, cancelling any previous selection;
Search for members, where you can find a member or set of members using a whole host of criteria;
Awaiting Activation, which shows a list of members that have registered but not yet clicked on the link in the activation e-mail. Spam robots will usually end up in here. Note that this activation has nothing to do with our Full / Basic membership system;
Export Addresslist, which is used to export the current Active Full Member list to an Excel spreadsheet for mailing and label purposes. Note that this function only works correctly with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office on a Windows PC;
Send Reminders, a function which is used to send reminders to overdue members manually. If Automated Operations (see below) are on this function does not work;
Expire Overdue Members, a function to de-activate expired members after a grace period. If Automated Operations (see below) are on this function does not work;
and finally: Settings. Here the settings for the membership system are set. These should only be changed if absolutely necessary, do not play with these settings lightly.
Membership Settings
Settings
This screen shows the settings for the Full Membership administrative system. The key setting is Automatic Operation. In normal mode that should be on and the system does most of the membership actions automatically.
Note: most of the values in this screen are sample values, the real values in the system will be different. Do not change these unless you are absolutely certain of what you are doing.
Other settings of interest are:
Reminder period days (which is the number of days prior to expiry that a reminder notice is sent, and with what period (interval) it is repeated;
Expiry period, or how many days after expiry is the membership deactivated. In the current manual system this is set to 90 days. With full automatic operation a period of maximum twice the Reminder Period is fine;
E-mail for correspondence, typically set to the membership administrator e-mail address;
A setting for when e-mails are sent to the administrator. To avoid flooding your mailbox, don't ask for all notifications (except for when you are starting out);
PayPal e-mail address: the e-mail address associated with the PayPal account of the group. This should not be changed lightly!
Postal Payment Link: the URL of the page on the site where postal payment options are explained and given. If people select postal payment they are led here.
The annual fees for membership in Euro's and Dollars. Note that this will need to be changed manually on other parts of the website where these fees may be listed (notably the membership pages).
