User Names - New Boards

[Rolla Hessel]

As of this writing over 180 folks have registered on the new boards since Tuesday July 10th! It is exciting to see the activity and we appreciate your patience and suggestions for improvements. As you have seen, Ted and Jan are working extremely hard, are quite responsive and are trying to address your concerns in a prompt manner. While we have had a few minor speed bumps as we started this journey, based on 95% of the feedback we are getting, we ARE moving in the right direction and most people are pleased with the changes. When the decisions were made regarding the set up and registration process for the new board there were multiple people involved and the decisions made were for just cause. One that has raised question was the showing of your full name on the posts.

There are many reasons why this decision was made but here are just a few:

-Security of the board itself. Using your full names as your UserName is a great way to keep spam bots from getting access to the board. There are robots who will automatically register for message boards/forums and can automatically post junk on the board which significantly reduces the enjoyment for the members.

-It helps make the process of upgrading new members to Full members. Since this is a manual process for the time being, new members names have to be manually compared to a current paid member listing before upgrading accounts.

-Newer members (and some long time ones as well) have reported having trouble putting members' handles together with their actual names when they meet at an event. So to make things easier we now show both the real names as well as your handle.

-Consistency of registering members, everyone registers the same way, and this way it is easier for some of you to remember your User Name.

As a way to try to address the very real concerns of a small group of our members about the "outside" world seeing that they are members of the NTBA Board, we have now changed the way the forums are viewed by the outside world. Effective immediately, the only people who can see your login names are those who are registered members themselves and have logged in. What that means is that no one, not even the search engines have access to your login name unless you personally post it in one of the forums. Even then, they will still have NO access to any of your personal information. As always, the security of you, our members continues to be of TOP priority to the board and the NTBA Officers and always will be. Many of you have visited the other web sites out there, I encourage all of you to continue, and hope you will find like I have, that the new improved NTBA Members site is something we can all be proud to call or own, and that we can all encourage T-Bucket owners to come and join our very special Family.

As always, if you have questions or suggestions about the new site, please feel free to pass them on to Ted, Jan or myself. Not all suggestions are doable, and many will take time to implement, but if your suggestion makes sense, is easily doable and is in the best interest of the majority of our members, we will try to make it happen in a timely fashion.

Until later,

Rolla Hessel
President
National T-Bucket Alliance