We think membership might be up a bit since the £25 joining fee was abolished a year ago. We'll be adding up the numbers later today.Originally Posted by 5teve L
We think membership might be up a bit since the £25 joining fee was abolished a year ago. We'll be adding up the numbers later today.
This is now a work in progress.
This site is about to be migrated over to a new host, Nimbus Hosting.
Hopefully, once fully over, that will fix, or reduce, the site down time.
This is also the beginning stage of upgrade work.
I spoke to a development company yesterday who will be making an assessment in the next week with a view to moving the site from vB to XenForo. The change won't be immediate, if they take the job on, they can't start the work for at least 5 weeks and it may take three weeks to complete.
As I don't yet know anything about how it might go with XenForo for members profiles with pictures, albums and info, would it be impossibly difficult to create something suitable using wordpress, perhaps a bit like the RTOC .asp site to which Goobie refers in the above post?
Okay, here are my views on the club. It's not about the website, but more the club in general.
My main view echoes some of the thoughts and points raised by 5teve L. As times change, and the cars most of us own become rarer and collectors items, does the club really need to commit a large amount of money each year to funding a track day? Is the time going to come where most of the members are in their 30's, 40's even 50's and all they want to do is meet up somewhere and discuss the cars and share their memories?
If this does become reality, spending a lot of money on a track day will not attract this kind of member to the club. I know there are many people who love track days, but does it need to be the RTOC that organises these? Could this not just been done on an individual basis and then advertised by the club?
If it were me, I would like to see the money raised from annual membership renewals directed towards other ventures. These would be trying to source and locate rare parts. Or if parts cannot be purchased, then looking at investing into reproduction parts. For example, just image if the club could take the lead in manufacturing fibreglass body panels etc. This could ensure many of the cars remain on the road for years.
In my personal opinion, spending a lot of money on a national day (no matter how much fun that day provides for the type of member who enjoys it) will not preserve and secure the future of the club. However, helping to make sure the cars stay on the road will.
Just my views, this is not an attack on anybody or any aspect of the club.
Great idea with the likes. This imo is what makes Facebook the world leader in the form of a "socially friendly" site, if someone's post is twaddle/stirring/inflammatory then the majority can favour or dislike.
This is a good two fold indicator; One being a gauge of consensus of opinion and the other to determine if the same members "like" or "dislike" the same members posts etc (to dispel the notions of ganging up/cliques/agendas/general ar$e kissing)
As far as clicking a link or plugin to refer posts to the Facebook area of the club is also a very good way of expanding on the club format as we already know it has a wider audience, but I would say that also brings a couple of issues to light also.
Facebook is free to join as is the RTOC FB group so we can use is as a promotional tool yet would have to control it in a way that befits the RTOC T&Cs. What I mean is swearing and all things that are common place on FB are against the rules here, imo that is useful as sometimes certain jokes/pictures/memes are a good way of socialising and relaxing so to speak. Perhaps RTOC at times is very strict and frosty toward taboo subjects (possibly a necessity) and the social networking side of things would be the best way to bridge the gap so to speak.
If a member of the RTOC FB group asked a tech question for instance I think it would be bad news to post the answers on FB, rather link them to the appropriate thread on RTOC, how we would do this correctly is anyone's idea because imo the fact there are so many people offering their guidance rapidly FOC makes the FB groups the success they are.....(every pay to join website in all of Christendom has this same issue to overcome/find the answer)
Just a few things that I was thinking about......
If the club would like any help in the future id be willing to offer a few of my hours a week, ive already made Blunty aware if I can help I will.
I think the club rules and regulations need looking at, they list a lot of what people want but in my eyes (and i could be wrong) have not being followed. They can be found here
https://www.rtoc.org/club/?show=committee
it covers things like term of service, elections and such that has been something mentioned by a few on here.
Shout if you need anything.
Enough time and planning and I think you could.
Personally I would either :
Vbulletin5 + wordpress or
Xenforo
I agree with this entirely, and this was the point I was trying to make. Membership money could them be perhaps spent on practical ways of ensuring these classic Renaults stay alive. Far more important than track days if you ask me.I don't know the answer to the ND thing, it's a shame as it was/is a big part of the club. It would be nice to be able to arrange a large gathering somewhere that had hard standing, where you could chat, look over cars, meet new members & have something else to keep you busy if you wanted to, fair, stalls, poss a 0-60 or something, show & shine (yes I did go there) Trackdays are good, i love them, but I also love pod/drag racing. Thats not what ND is about though, is it ?? It's about a load of Renault turbo enthusiasts meeting up
I liked the trackday. Got everything for everyone then ? ( I must admit no drag but .. )
Do we have a gallery section so we can post pics of our cars and see everybody else cars???
If not can we get one??
Always find it good to look what everybody else has done to there cars
Martyn
Martyn,
You can create folders in and upload images to your profile that people can then browse.
Otherwise you can add images/files in this area.
https://www.rtoc.org/files/
There's a lot to this club/site, have a root around.
Edit - ignore this, I see the discussion on the other thread about this.
Last edited by Trevhib; 13-01-2014 at 10:17.
A copy of this site had been migrated to the new host this week. They attempted to repair the broken profile photo albums but did not succeed.
The development company have been in touch and are intending to have a look next week and make an assessment as were too busy this week.
I doubt they attempt any fixes at this time. Another developer or SQL expert, would have to be contacted in the meantime to try and get that done.
So without sounding rude, how far along are we in some of these, imo, very good suggestions, both here & in Moggy's thread ?
Can we have a list of roles within the club to be filled, be it committee based, or just helper roles please ?
What do the committee think needs to change ? We haven't really heard from you guys at all apart from Ian really.
One thing that needed to change was the fact that about 250 members were not paying the membership fee.
After I added up the 2013 numbers from PayPal it became apparent that the website showed about 250 more members than payments.
So we had a close look at things and Scoff wrote some new code to interrogate the database and do some comparisons so we could filter and filter and end up with a list of those people.
Many of them are regular members. Maybe half are logging on perhaps once a month. About 40 each week, or each day!!!
Some have not paid for years.
About half were moved immediately to the registered user group. The rest are somewhat or very regular users and are in the process of being processed by Alex.
The causes of this remain unclear, some will have been set up incorrectly in the first place, others may have been the results of system errors and one or more faults with the vBulletin system.
If half or those people renew that = about £1800 per year income.
The bottom line is that, collectively, regular members have been effectively cheating the club out of probably £2000 a year.
that's shocking....what we need is some transparency....my friends have me on a group on whatsapp, msg straight to your phone whenever anyone posts anything on the page. would help us all keep in contact and be aware of changes/issues and anything else. just a suggestion.
WTF, for how long? Why was it not noticed?
Dear me. From a club management point of view, we have a certain number of members each year and therefore an expectation of the subscription income. For it to be so far out of line and not be noticed (for years in some cases), beggars belief when the club has an incumbent treasurer. Isn't ensuring that membership fees (the club's primary income source) are in line, very close to the top of the priority list?
This is club's pigeon and not the member's who have failed to put their hand up when they realised their renewal date has come and gone (on more than one occasion).
Of all the things to choose to disclose, this situation should have been rectified (financially), as much as possible internally before outing it.
Last edited by Trevhib; 26-01-2014 at 17:30.
im sure there's some sort of explanation for it all, but i do have to agree. How often is there an audit with the clubs finances? surely something like that would of picked up on the fact that for years we haven't had everything we should in the bank?
Surely appointing an accountant to do the books etc would be money well spent in this situation!! It would only be £200 - £600 per year I should imagine, maybe whoever does the accounts and books for the club shop could do it?? Of course I could be way off track as I am not an accountant so i have no idea how things should be done in this situation, the wife is! And no I am not touting for business!
someone must of been doing the books already for the tax man every year?
Isn't that the job of the Treasurer....
I can only conclude that no one has been otherwise this would have been picked up sooner surely? Still it's done now, all we can do is find a good way to move forward...
The blasé way of mentioning that the club has been missing out on an extra ~£1800 each year, for christ knows how many years, is fascinating.
And to think I've been put on restricted access for less...
And no-one says anything about 250 less than honest members!
No, it's not the treasurers fault! Why should it be!
I don't count up the number of members and make sure they all paid, that's not my remit. Paying bills the, publishing the bank accounts.
Steve you were on the committee for years, so you should know full well. Mart you were on the committee too.
This has been put right Trev! That's what I just posted!
The point made here is that so many of the regular members have not mentioned that fact there was problem with their account.
This is a club where some people voluntarily contribute a lot of time and effort for free, yet the culture of a large part of the membership would appear to be to take all they can get and give nothing.
And the few posters here don't think that's wrong! But want to blame someone!
FFS. Why do I bother!
ive asked questions to try and ascertain, how this is happened and why hasn't it been noticed until now? That can then lead to stopping it from happening again. No digs, dont get your knickers in a twist over it.
Yes I was on the Committee Ian, but I was only looking after events, not the club finances.
Any club money I had was Immediately paid into the club accounts ASAP...
Partly because it's not particularly obvious; the way the vBulletin presents the numbers is not clear. it took a few people working together and some new code written to make it make sense.
vB shows members in various ways, eg, active members are not the total number of members, they are the number who have logged on over a time period, eg 3 months.
Total members include the ex-memers in the registered users usergroup who don't pay a fee.
There was probably an expectation of mostly honesty and people to just pay their fee.
I expect there was an assumption by all that the vB payments and memberships system was getting it right.
No-one on the committee had ever looked this closely at the way vB does what it does in this regard. It's only just become apparent.
It was discovered due to a discussion between different people with different interests. One had counted the PayPal receipts, another had looked at the vBulletin member list and I was curious to look into it further and this time people were on hand to facilitate that.
Finding this out was very labour intensive and, frankly, we're volunteers with little time for this.
I've tried to explainAnd hopefully the measures created now will lessen the problem. But a lot of it is due to the way vB works, or doesn't quite.
I was on the Committee (had access to CM boards), what, 10 years ago (?) so forgive me if I've long since forgotten about membership levels & income.
If that's been the case since then though, that's ~£18k gone astray. And that amount has only just been picked up on now?
Didn't you leave in about Jan 2008?
It can't have been £2000 per year since Sep 2008 when this vBulletin site came to be. I don't know, or know if it's even possible to ascertain, what the accrued loss has been. Not all of those people would have continued to pay but would have moved on and their account drop into the registered users group.
Some, presented with a renewal fee, would have stopped being members.
I didn't say anything negative, I was being constructive and looking for a solution going forward.
So not only did I agree that there was a problem, I also offered a possible solution. Everyone has their own opinions so please feel free to see my suggestion as non viable...
Ok thanks for the reply and it's clearly not just a case of, we have such and such members so should have this income. But surely it should be, especially now there is only one tier of payment. I guess all those who have been given free access have been given a period of grace to pay up or have they had access restricted (for want of a better phrase)
Thanks Rob, only if they knew how to disassemble the way vBulletin tallies up it's numbers and make it make sense.
The only 'real' info I could get was the PayPal receipts, which is why I started there.
Agreed.
I know that I do not understand them. Is there no way, like PayPal, of seeing who has paid by bank transfer etc? Even if it is by manually looking through bank records? Long winded and a pain in the bum I know...
That's what I did!
But before trying to crate a list from that, we needed a list to compare it with.
We looked at the members database in various ways and then some code was written to allow a new way to filter it and simply view who was still listed as a current member but had not logged on for more than 12 months. That identified a lot of accounts that should have expired but hadn't.
Then a way to identify a list of current users who were not paying but should be was devised.
Going forward maybe it would be a good idea to log any monies received. Again I know that this may be time consuming but a simple excel spreadsheet is a start...
Of course though I do realise that this may need a bit more of someone's time but it could be worthwhile..
That's what I did!
Credit where it is due, that's not a nice job!
vB is supposed to do this, and does, but the problem has come, mainly, from the expiry dates and the system not working correctly to actually expire some accounts.
There probably isn't a easy manual method to check at the end date of each 12 months for each account to see if a new payment has arrived. Anyway, that is what computers are for
Also, this is a problem that would take a few years to become apparent as when the errors are small in quantity, they would have been be ignored as a weirdness of vB a no-one knew how to give them meaning.
That's why I'm old school, I know nothing about programming!!vB is supposed to do this, and does, but the problem has come, mainly, from the expiry dates and the system not working correctly to actually expire some accounts.
There probably isn't a easy manual method to check at the end date of each 12 months for each account to see if a new payment has arrived. Anyway, that is what computers are for
Re members not paying, Ian is right. It's not anyones fault and it's not something that's obvious. To be honest it's only by pure luck we actually found the issueIt's all sorted now.
You'd think at least a few members might have mentioned the fact they haven't paid, some hadn't paid since 2008. We should charge back rent!
There a lot of people on facebook group who are not members on this club ,facebook Renault 5 gt is getting more bigger by the day ,the parts and advice I've had on there is massive ,it's a good idea to push this social media more for rtoc people use facebook more than rtocA fair point re FB Hoolio, I'll see if Romil can sort something
I see where you're coming from nowI've posted up and asked if Romil can sort it out on FB.
Just to be clear then. Does this mean in other words, that those who have not paid for their current years' membership are going to have the renewal page in front of them the next time they log on? (or at some point in the very near future). That's what I meant by sorted out financially in my post above.
There are indeed lots of people that have given up hours and hours of their spare time. And very, very near the top of the priority list (at the expense of things less important as necessary), should have been for one or other of those people to reconcile membership payments with the number of registered members.
In an ideal world....
When the website went vB, you'd have thought understanding the member numbers would have been an important and specified requirement. As would being able to interrogate membership payments.
Regarding the expiry system. You can't presume programmers get anything right since they are only human too and bugs always find their way in. This kind of thing should be tested by users before going live and monitored thereafter.
Matt.
How much of what the RTOC site does is catered for on FB? If you could list the similarities and differences, that would be useful. I can't go on and check for myself as I'm not on FB.
Behave. If sky gave you service for free would you feel morally obliged to mention it? I dont think I would
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