End of Term Clean Up!

[BikerScout007]

Hey Pathfinders,

First, thanks for your continuing support of my tenure as your Detachment Leader.  It's been a thrill leading this Detachment and we have a lot of fun stuff coming up in the next term:  new CRLs, Star Wars Celebration Anaheim and the 20th Anniversary of the Pathfinder Detachment!

Because of changes in elections that passed earlier this year, the new term starts on February 17th.  So for the next two weeks we'll be doing some behind the scenes clean up of our forum so we can start fresh for the new term

First, the Legion has automated the process of checking active membership against the Detachment database.  This helps the Legion decide who is and isn't eligible to participate in Detachment elections every term.  In case you didn't know, Detachment membership is contingent on a few things: 

• you're an active, trooping member of the 501st; 
• you have an approved Pathfinder costume; 
• AND you have logged into the forum at least once within the calendar year of the term. 

If you haven't done this last thing, you will be automatically marked as "Inactive" as far as Detachment membership is concerned and ineligible to vote, even if you have a costume and are not Reserve or Retired.

If you ask any Detachment Leader what their least favorite part of the job is and their answer isn't "maintaining the Database", that means they probably haven't been maintaining it!   After years and years of neglect, @Dart and I finally buckled down and over several days cleaned it up so we are now in perfect sync with the Legion.  I can't thank Dart enough for all his hard work on this.  It is not fun going through every non-syncing account and finding out what was wrong with it, but we have finally untangled that mess and are ready to move forward.

There were two big issues that were causing the vast majority of non-syncs.  The first was that people entered in extra characters in their "501st Designation" field on their profiles.  The only thing that should be there is your TK-ID number.  No prefixes, just the digits.  If you are a 3 or 4 digit, do not enter any leading zeroes.  Just the four or three digits that were assigned to you.  We've gone through and cleaned all that up.  You're welcome

Second -- we have too many groups!  This set up was fine when we just had two costumes, but now that we have more costumes (with more on the way!), it's getting to the point where it's going to be impossible to give every costume its own badge and forum grouping.  So going forward, all approved Pathfinders will be put into a group called "Pathfinders" and will get a badge reflecting the Detachment as a whole.  

BUT -- we still want you to be able to show off what costume you have on your forum profile.  If you go to Edit your profile now, you will see a new feature: "Approved Pathfinder Kits".  There you can check off which Detachment costumes you have and these will display on your forum profile (you can look at the info in my post as an example).  This also allows you to show when you have more than one Pathfinder costume, something we weren't able to do before with the old badges.

This process will take some time and will happen over the next few weeks.  Please reach out to me, @Dart or @Shortstack if you have any questions.

Whew!

Now second, because our domain has come up for annual renewal, I've decided to transfer our domain to the same company that hosts our website (HostGator) so that everything is in one neat place.  There may be some brief forum outages while the transfer is finalized, so please be patient!  If you need to reach Command, you can always find us via the Detachment's Facebook page.  

Tip of the Lance!

Mickey Bukowski
TB/ST-81974
Pathfinders Detachment Leader

 

[Sebswgougou]

Congrats Mickey !!! So proud to be part of the Pathfinders !!

Thanks for all the info and I wish us a wonderfull new term

[ferra]

Wow, thanks Guys! Already edited my profile