For an excellent guide to using your myfreeforum forum, you can visit howtodoit
The howtodoit "readonly" forum provides answers and walkthroughs for all common questions.
Not installed yet, as we have to deploy all the new portals code as a batch.
But if you use the USERINFO portal, then it can be set to transfer the 2 letter country code of the users country to an xprofile field.
Then you could set the image part of that field to show either:
/ranks/ccflags/{FLAG}.png (user you own profile name)
or
/ranks/ccflags_medium/{FLAG}.png
to show a smaller flag. Set to display in topics and you will see which country a user is from.
Note that for this to work the {MYFF.USERINFO) portal must be included somewhere. Though you could actually blank out its template, so that it does the work invisibly.
Just a heads up, at some point in the next week or two new portal code will be installed.
When the portals were written, they were written for efficiency, the code for each portal only getting included if the portal was used.
All well and good, but there was a single file with the configuration for all portals that always got included. Not a problem at the start but this has now grown to 1080 lines which is not a clever size.
So the rewrite will take the configurations out into their own files.
Which in English means the information that wells the world how to get to your forum.
I am working through making all the DNS set up for the forums consistent, we have been through loads of permutations over the years and whilst it has all been working the inconsistencies should not be there.
We will now be rationalizing to three of our own nameservers 1 in Europe and 2 in America and a 3rd party system that will receive its updates in a totally different manner to the others.
This should be robust, and in fact is pretty much what happens now anyway.
However is had to be admitted that updating it all is a tricky process and so I'm posting this as a head up in case anything goes wrong and someone finds they cannot see their forum.
This portal now allows transfers from one FIELD name to another. So for example if you let people accumulate CASH, they could donate some of that towards a REPUTATION field for another user.
I don't want to raise any alarm bells here, but at some point in the not too distant future we are going to be buying new web servers.
This is against a background of a continuing slump in advertising revenue, and the recession has also hit the ability of the parent company to continue to subsidize the forums.
In a nutshell this means about $10,000 needs to be found from somewhere this year. That amounts to about $3 from each really active forum on the system.
We will never do popups, or those horrible adverts where you need to click to get past them to get to the bit you want, or anything else for that matter that we hate to see when visiting forums.
So what are the options?
1) We are playing about with other advertisers. This is already happening, the banners are the same size and same position as always and so people probably have not noticed. Revenue generated this week from that is zero!
2) Putting in an appeal for donations to paypal[at]myfreeforum.org or via the shop. If 1000 forums gave $10 each, that would instantly buy a decent server.
3) Getting a bit heavier on advertising to "guests". Something like you see here not too awful? and might even make people register on forums?
4) Using http://infolinks.com/ a solution that does not take up forum space, but is rather intrusive in my opinion
I'd like peoples opinion on the options and to hear other suggestions. As I say there is no "panic" we are well into the black despite the crunch, but equally if we are going to continue to provide the service level we have to make sure the books continue to balance and that we can invest in new servers when we need to.
The MYFF.USERINFO portal allows you to show the Country code, flag and ip address of a user, along with their standard user details, xprofile fields etc.
The flag/country code are what we detect from the IP address.
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