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New Member List


Kent

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Not satisfied with how the other list of members worked, I had a custom one created.  It is now available underneath the Membership menu.

1. First a couple words about security,  privacy and permissions:

  • You must be registered for the site to see it all.  If you haven't registered, and signed in, you cannot see the List.
  • Location information is only visible to dues-paying Club Members.
  • This information cannot be found (aka crawled)  and indexed by search Bots (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.).  Those Bots can only index information that is publicly visible to all -- if access is restricted, they cannot index it nor make it available for anyone else to see. Further, as you might have noticed, the entire site is running under HTTPS now  so-- everything sent back and forth to the server is encrypted -- so this private information cannot be hijacked enroute, as it travels over the internet.  It is secure.

2.  You can click the heading of any column to sort the list by that data field.  Once you have clicked the column heading, it will change color, then it will sort the database by that field in descending order. highest to lowest. Once that sort is complete, a little up/down arrow control will appear beside the title in the heading.  You can click that and reverse the sort to ascending order, lowest to highest.

3.  Rolling your cursor over the member's username will pop up a "preview" of their profile information.  Clicking on their user name will take you directly to their profile.

4.  Using the looking glass icon on the right, you can search for members by state, for example, if you have that access level.  Note that since state is a typed in field, it can be either abbreviated or spelled out. 

5.  Now to explain the members listed with missing data:

  • If a member comes and joins through Facebook, it brings only their name, and doesn't require them to fill out any more of the required info at that time,  I've implemented a check that will pop up a message the next time they visit the site, with a link to update all that required info before they can post.
  • For some unknown period of time, the field State was not being checked on the old site, and some members joined without completing that field.  This new popup warning will "catch them" the next time they visit, and require them to fill it in.
  • Meanwhile we are left with this incomplete data...

EDIT:  We've re-imported some of the user profile data from the old site, and now there's only 101 records with the State missing.  I hope the "popup warning" will clear some of those up.  Some were "spammers" or other "intruders" that I have banned, and don't want to delete the record because it is banning their IP address to prevent them doing it again.

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Just noticed that search by state does not translate the abbreviations into the states. I search using postal code for state and didn't find my name, because I had spelled out the state. Maybe we should set a guideline for how to enter the state so the search works better.

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1 hour ago, GWGAllisfan said:

Just noticed that search by state does not translate the abbreviations into the states. I search using postal code for state and didn't find my name, because I had spelled out the state. Maybe we should set a guideline for how to enter the state so the search works better.

I thought of that too, perhaps a 2 position default, but I'm betting at this point it would require someone to hand edit every spelled out state.

Another thought was, rather than someone doing that, maybe it would be possible to delete all the state entries, so every member got a notification to edit next time they logged on.....

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The challenge is that we have members from outside the US, who use postal codes (often 6-position or more, alphanumeric) rather than a 5-digit numerical zip code.  They use provinces, districts or counties instead of state, etc.,   So trying to implement a "pick from a list" kind of process to select the correct info is very, very complicated -- imagine the complexity of trying to build and maintain that mailing address information for every country in the world..  Then add the fact that some of this info is 18 years old, and some members haven't been on the site in a long, long time --  so if we delete it out and expect them to come back and fill it back in, we'll be left with missing data likely forever.

I'm going to research a bit more, to make sure that we didn't miss some zip codes in the initial conversion, but that's about all we can readily do short of manual editing. Even then, it is complicated. Both in the old site and this new site, the additional details of address is not a part of the actual profile table of information in the database, but rather in a separate table (cross-referenced by member ID - a sequential number initially based on when they registered, creating their profile).  That member ID changed in this new software as all new profiles were created in a different sequence, so all searches to retrieve and convert the information now has to be done by username.  It's a two-step conversion on each side (old and new) to find the correct bit of information, using first the profile table and then the additional detail(s), and then find where to put it in the new database.  We just did it to clean up some of the missing states, however, and we can do that again for zip/postal code if needed.

Bottom line is that short of manual editing, there's not much we can do to clean up what we have..  but, I can add a short bit of instructions on the registration screen to tell them what to do going forward. Of course, whether they take the time to read and follow the instructions is a whole different story... Forcing them to do it a specific way is darned near impossible.

So, to do a search by state, we have to search both for the abbreviation and it spelled out -- then hope it is spelled correctly...

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Well then LOL. I hadn't thought of other countries, So I would suggest just leaving it alone, with your note and hope the majority uses the 2 letter abbreviation.

I rarely search by state, and I know about it so if I do, I search both ways. Not a big deal IMO

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44 minutes ago, rokon2813 said:

Well then LOL. I hadn't thought of other countries, So I would suggest just leaving it alone, with your note and hope the majority uses the 2 letter abbreviation.

I rarely search by state, and I know about it so if I do, I search both ways. Not a big deal IMO

I just added the note:  "Please abbreviate rather than spell out"

Again, I'm not sure how other countries abbreviate that info.  Canada uses 2-character, I believe, but what about Australia?  No clue!  

We'll see how that works...

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Kent, each state/territory uses a 2 or 3 letter abbreviation.

Victoria - VIC

New South Wales - NSW

Queensland - QLD

South Australia - SA

Western Australia - WA

Tasmania - TAS

Northern Territory - NT

Australian Capital Territory - ACT

and that land mass to our North East, that takes 15 hours non stop to fly to, we call USA!

Edited by dince
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All I was suggesting was we suggest guidance for new members and perhaps old members would consider cleaning up the issue in accordance with that.  I think I will go in and edit mine to the postal abbreviation.

Another possibility: Is there a way to get the field to let you use a wild card search?  Like our ERP system at work lets you search with partial info as long as there is an * in front and back.  For instance *110* would return every where "110" appear in order, while 110* would only return those starting with 110. I've also seen systems use %, or other codes.

OK... After changing my state to GA, it appears the system already does search for anywhere those letters appear together, so when I search "GA" I get several pages of Michigan first. It took me a minute to realize what was happening.

I'm not sure how many states the postal abbreviation would be a part of another states name...That would be a neat trivia item to consider..

 

Edited by GWGAllisfan
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