Postby Admin » Tue Mar 05, 2019 4:10 pm
Short answer is Yes, long answer is .... sort of.
It's relatively simple to add extra fields to profiles, but if you saw my mailbox and how many queries I get day after day after day from people who can't work out how to even find their profile let alone edit it, you'd understand why I'm thinking that I'll actually remove the field I put in last year for MMOC membership. The very very VERY large majority of our users are not in any way IT literate, and simply differentiating between the forum login and the membership login is considerably beyond their ability. Unfortunately it's worse than that, because they then write me stroppy emails demanding that I fix it for them. I'm not worried about the work of adding fields, that's the easy part, I'm worried about the additional burden of supporting the literally hundreds of people who will need support in how to manage it. Yup, I can write Help files, but I already have for other things and nobody reads them. Yes I can write actually on the page that this login won't work for the messageboard because it's the login for membership, but I HAVE written that, right above the fields I'm talking about. And I still get at least eight mails a week from people who haven't read it, but insist that I fix it for them anyway.
Lets also not forget that only a very small fraction of MMOC members are members of this messageboard, and conversely there are thousands of members of the board who AREN'T members of the club. What do we do about people who aren't members of the board? Create 'empty' profiles with just the car details? Who's going to keep those profiles updated? How do we deal with 'malicious' entries, where someone intentionally posts details of parts he doesn't actually own, maybe because he's got a beef with someone, or just for the devilment of screwing up the feature? How is it 'policed' to stop that type of behaviour?
But lets imagine that I waved a magic wand and those problems didn't occur any more, we're still not out of the woods. What happens when someone sells a car but doesn't bother removing the details we've listed from their profile. Now we have the same details, for two (or more) different people. Who's going to ensure that everyones details are up to date? It's a mammoth task. It won't be me - I currently spend at least an hour a day keeping up with board updates, conversations, email support, etc etc etc already!
Now, I'm not suggesting for a second that it's complicated so lets not do it - I'm merely pointing out that simplistic comments like 'I don't understand why the club haven't done it' just skim over the huge complexities it throws up (and that's without mentioning your valid point about is it right for the club to promote sharing of info that could potentially be used for purposes other than that it was provided for). I'm happy, as I said to Irmscher above, to provide space and bandwidth, and even some degree of support, for a scoping project. But I haven't the spare time, or inclination, to do it on my jack jones. And call me a cynic, but I'm going to take a wild guess that Irmscher isn't going to step forward...
Mike Dean
MMOC Webmaster
