Dave K 🔜 Fitting into my breeches again

You can probably guess why I posted this.

Don't do solo breath play.

My interest is moreso compiling an archive from the early-internet, crawled from the wayback machine presented in a way that's easy to navigate, specifically the sites for bars and businesses in the community.

I stumbled onto it in like 1998 looking for cool edgy stuff online haha

I regret to inform you that hell.com is no longer the website for a pretentious 90s art collective, it's some bible shit now

Saw this and immediately thought to myself "Someone should assemble a centralized archive of these old leather-related websites" and then "I'll probably be the one who has to do this" and then "This means my old hell.com ripoff artfag website project is on hold again"

Interesting! I recall in my early exploration into latex on the web reading about "dreaded white stuff" on latex and I just assumed the person was writing about cum haha

Web browser view of a grid layout of profiles with a sidebar on the left with consisting of several sections which contain different buttons that can apply filters.

It looks newer but has taken a huge hit in useability/intuitiveness imo, and it appears they're dropping the ability to see anybody outside of X miles from the location your browser provides or search based on location.

From just a UI/UX standpoint, hoo boy it's not looking great.

I checked out the new Recon layout to see how it's coming and I'm here to tell you all that modernizing a layout to look a decade old while further separating all users from real-life community is going to suck so bad

lmao

I regret to inform you that Canadian Tire has made the SS bolt Christmas decorations woke

Going to PS for NYE. I'm gonna need to know what's happening that weekend and which dads I should meet

You, a fraud with a sash: "Something something community service, be honorable and accountable"
Me, a serious Leather Community Leader: "Sign my petition to force the LA&M to recognize Clarence Carter's 'Strokin' as the first JOI music video"

All good.

Does Spearhead do any sort of online management of events or members, or is the new WordPress site basically a "marketing" site?

I don't manage the web app for the 15, someone else does. But I'll shoot him a message to let him know the cert for it is invalid

It's an alias for the15association.org. Looks like the SSL cert is no longer valid for the alias/forwarding site

The 15's site is old timey PHP that is a straight up workhorse. I talked with the eng who coded it about open sourcing it, but I ended up writing something myself instead.

Oh, I also built functionality that will allow our sponsors to include their messaging in our E-Blast.

If you'd like to sponsor a Leather club with ~170 dues-paying members and access our mailing list of ~500 verified users, hit me up.

Or if you want to use my software we can figure something out.

I'm really proud of what I've built! I took a lot of inspiration from www.15sf.org in functionality but made it work for what our club does.

We are going to run through a bunch of workflows and fix bugs before I share the link, but if your club/group is thinking of ditching Wordpress, HMU.

Oh! And we're doing our part to make the web fun again. There are easter eggs, april fools jokes built in, little css fireworks on NYE or snowflakes during the winter.

The final thing I want to point out, that so many groups are missing, is allowing users to request events be added to our calendar. This way, our web app is not just for running the club, it is a community hub for our community to see what other events are happening locally that are of-interest

One thing I will say is fortunate is PMP and Mailchimp provide csv data exports, so we can import users, memberships, and mailing list recipients very easily.

The app even handles special-case attendees. Constant no-shows result in a user's access to RSVPing taken away. Individuals who need extra attention have a set of notes pop up in the app when the doorman signs them into the event.

Even end of month reporting, for finances (tracked via purchases and renewals in the app) and membership is in-app.

The idea is to use the app to effectively run the club faster, cheaper, and more lean. That way, the board can focus on putting on events and investing time into those.

QR codes are sent in emails to attendees, which get scanned (in-app) and can only be scanned by an authorized user logged into the app.

Board members can write all attendees to an event if anything has to be passed along to them, or to volunteers to coordinate prior to the event.

Thanks to being able to schedule jobs, we can now remind guys of upcoming events, tell the president to queue up the e-blast, set up temporary "doorman" access to scan guys into events

The site itself looks fairly straight forward.

Where things get fun is that users can now buy tickets to paid events, rsvp for free events, and sign up for volunteer shifts all on an event's page.

The mailing list involves a few clicks to choose the layout and the events/posts.

Aside from the monetary cost, the time cost of using these tools was horrific. Sending an e-blast, updating the web site, and updating events is a monthly job that takes 10 hours or so. Managing social media also takes a significant time commitment.

The solution was to unify and automate.

We used to use EventBrite for events, but having to send about 10% of everything to them is just too much. Last year for our anniversary party we lost out on about $1500 because of reliance on 3rd parties.

Wordpress aside, we also had to pay $35/month to send one email a month to our subscribers via Mailchimp.

Also, users randomly get unsubscribed from it when they renew their membership, due to the PMP/Mailchimp plugin deciding to do this randomly.