A new path forwards, possibly?

[Ed]

The last few days have been intriguing and slightly odd for me. First, I discovered that it’s possible to connect Patreon to this site, allowing some level (very basic) of content here limited to people supporting the community on Patreon.

This opens up a whole new way of handling the Community Supporter feature and extra functionality like monthly recurring subscriptions etc.

Second, I got locked out of the site for 2 days. I’m hoping most of you noticed that I wasn’t here for 48 hours, but it looks like nobody did! Don’t ask me what happened. It was an unlucky combination of changing my password and messing up the new password too many times. Unfortunately, the new password change had been blocked by the security system and I didn’t know. Having access to the files on the site, I disabled the security system (thinking that would restore my access) but that’s not how the security system works and, now it was disabled, it could not restore my access after a time limit. I’ve finally got back in but it’s been a pain and it’s uncovered a lot of other minor issues here. I’m still working through fixing those.

Patreon’s limited integration (it doesn’t support pages or forums, just posts) will mean a wide-reaching reorganisation of the site so I’ll be planning that for a few days. I expect the entire forum system to reduce to three forums. The Community Supporter forum will end. I’ll be making much fuller use of the categories system and pushing a lot of my content towards blog posts and (hopefully) enhancing the comments system on those posts. I suspect the articles will go and I’ll simplify the right column a lot.

I might also remove the top menu and expand the righthand menu box to replace it (as that works better on mobiles anyway). All dares apart from the Master Dare List will go and I have yet to decide what to do with the Vote-Offs. They may become a category of post, instead of a menu/page. I can have a category for them so a link in the menu box so you will be able to list just the Vote-Off posts. That should cope better with more of them as the list expands.

The Patreon integration will interfere with the “Community Supporter” badge. There’s no way to automate that and I will not be notified of the site username of Patreon supporters so it will be hard to keep the existing badge system in sync with reality.

 

Those of you who have been Community Supporters or have been considering it, how do you feel about using Patreon?

Diana likes this

[Anonymous]

Thought it had been a bit quiet around here.

Well if patreon becomes a thing then Im in on thebsupporter side of it all.

Good to have you back about

Diana and Ed like this

[Ed]

I’m beginning to integrate Patreon into the site. It’s going to take a while and there might be some quirkiness during the transition.

I’ve decided on the 3 forums that will exist in place of the current arrangement. I’m going to replace the 70 Supporter Only video posts in the relevant forum to posts, but that’s going to take a few days. It’s probably a good thing that no expiring Community Supporters have renewed their status recently as after the transition to Patreon, there’s no way to provide access to the Patreon-controlled stuff for existing supporters.

I’m considering including Naked Experiment Report #1 with Patreon membership.

Would be good to hear from more of you about changing Community Support over to Patreon.

Matt likes this

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