Vbulletin Plugin Lack of Instructions

Can't delete... so clearing my post.

Gopher...You are missing contacting Alex with your questions and this post. Open a ticket and he will answer quickly...otherwise you can wait weeks waiting for him to catch up and find this post Also note, it is the holidays so expect a slight delay. Otherwise he answers problems very quickly during normal business hours.

Regarding our site, we started fresh so we do not have the same problems as you. Amember is really cool so don't get frustrated.

As for your user issue...I would implement Amember and start your new purchasing front end immediately using a new Vbulletin usergroup with identical privileges as your other usergroup with existing members. As users from the old usergroup expire have them signup again - putting new subscribers into the Amember tables. Otherwise, you may not like what Alex will have to tell you with regards to manual labor and some ass pains.

Good luck and if you need some help or discussion email me directly at s4driven@gmail.com.

GigaEnvy
aka Tom

Yup, I got a few answers from alex, but am figuring out some of it on my own.

It looks like it can work the way I want it, but as you say.. with MUCH work.

I don't quite understand the need for a separate (new) group - it seems to work with the same group, aMember only controls who it knows. The problem is all the others were manually joined by me with no expiration in site.. that means I have to actually do something with them.. half probably have expired for all I know, we haven't bothered to match them up recently with our "paper" membership db. Thats why we're turning to aMember - the madness must stop

I think I have a workaround... but it would involve help from the members. Because they control their passwords, I am going to set up a free membership and let them register. As they register, aMember gives them one year expiration dates. Once we have the majority registered I can turn on the actual costs and go in to set expiration dates to match our current database.

At that time we'd register those in our database that don't have forum userids (not everyone is on the Internet I'm told, go figure..) Now we have one central place to hold forum registerd users and those not using the Internet. The latter we'd have to edit manually... or maybe advertise that they can do online lookups and attract more to get online.

All in all its not perfect, but its all I've seen. Hopefully it will be powerful enough to keep things managed centrally and not in an access database on our secretary's local PC where none of us can see the data.

One quick question - anyone know how to set up a product that can allow a person to increase the default amount? In other words we have $30/year subscriptions, but often people select to donate more to our club. Online it is so static we'll miss out on these extra donations unless there is a way to allow a user to override the costs and type in a higher amount. Hmmm...