Welcome to ECCA!

[Tom]

To all new members, welcome to ECCA.

I thought it might be a good idea to run this thread as a tutorial on what is available to users here at ECCA

I will go through the links at the top of the navbar, one by one, and explain, and show how the links are used.

Pic of navbar for reference:



From Left to Right, I will explain the links on the second row

[Tom]

Front Page

This is the main front page of the site. It lists particular forums and threads within ECCA to populate the front page. It is layed out in two columns. The first column (far left) has a small welcome pane, the upcoming events, and basic ECCA stats. The second column has the ECCA News forum as the main provider of information. If you come across a news article that is about European Cars, put a new thread in the News Forum, and it will appear on the Front Page.

Below the News Articles, is a section with the 10 latest forum replies across the whole site.

[Tom]

Forums

In conjunction with this post, please read the Forums own FAQ about usage, and features available to users. Looking at the first row of the navbar I mentioned previously, I will go into detail what each of the links can/will do.

UserCP

This is the User Control Panel. Here you can find information about yourself, and the place to change settings for yourself.

In order, from top to bottom, left hand column:

"Your Profile"

• "Edit Your Details" - Contains all the options to change your details, be it Private or Public.
• "Edit Profile Picture" - Where you can set a small picture of yourself.

"Networking"

• "Contacts & Friends" - Add ECCA members to your own Contacts and Friends list. Within the UserCP, a list will come up and tell you if people on this list are online, on ECCA, at that point in time.
• "Social Groups" - Members can setup Social Groups within ECCA. There is no limit to what the groups can be.
• "Pictures & Albums" - One of the areas on ECCA where you can add your own pictures to the site. There is also the ECCA Photo Gallery, which we will go into more detail further down.

"Settings & Options"

• "Edit Avatar" - This is where you can setup the small picture that is shown on each thread, beside your username.
• "Edit Signature" - Dialog box for editing and creating your signature, which is similar to an email signature. This is for personal pictures/messages/quips etc. Any companies who want to advertise in their Sigs have to become Supporting Vendors. Sigs are definitely not for commercial advertising!
• "Edit Email & Password" - Edits your email address and password to the site
• "Edit Options" - Various options for settings across the site
• "Edit Ignore List" - This is where you add users to the ignore list. If a user is on this list, you will not see their posts, nor get Private Messages either.

"Private Messages"

As a general statement, this is where you can read, send, track Private Messages. You can also make folders to sort out your messages.

"Subscribed Threads"

Within your options, you can choose to automatically subscribe to threads. Whenever someone replies to a thread you have subscribed to, you will receive a message depending on how you have setup your settings. (Eg, receive an email straight away, or receive an email with a general description of all the threads you are subscribed to).

"Miscellaneous"

• "Event Reminders" - With this, if you look through the calendar, you can set an Event Reminder to remind you of an upcoming event.
• "Attachments" - Lists all the attachments you have ever posted to ECCA.

FAQ

This contains ALL of the Frequently Asked Questions for ECCA. Before asking, please look in the FAQ, as it may already be answered. If you're question isn't answered there, do a Search. If it still hasn't been answered, post a question in the Board Suggestions Forum. If you don't want to make it public, please send a PM to one of the staff, and they can look after you.

Members List

The members list is just that, a list of all the Registered Members on ECCA. If you are looking for someone in particular, use this list to find that person.

Calendar

The calendar contains everyones birthdays, and any events that the Administrators, Super Moderators, Moderators, or State Moderators decide to add in. State Moderators put in their respective States Events as they decide to.

New Posts

The New Posts is a pre-defined search function that lists all the New Posts since your last visit.

Search

Does just that, Search. There is a basic word search, plus an Advanced Section where you can look for keywords, user posts, and how you want to search.

Quick Links

Quick links takes you to various sections of the site, again pre-defined from the Board Software.

Log Out

No need to explain this one

[Tom]

ECCA Photo Gallery

The Photo Gallery has been provided to give members a place to store and upload photo's of whatever they want, ECCA related.

It has its own navbar, and two columns, similar to the Front Page.



The left hand column consists of:

"Statistics" - lists how many users, photo's, comments, views and disk space is used across the site.
"Random Images" - just some random images from all the photos contained within the Photo Gallery

The right hand column is made up of:

"Recent Photos" - 4 recent photo's just uploaded from our members

The next section is the Main Gallery. This has "Member Galleries" where each member has their own space to upload photo's, similar to the albums and photo's in each members UserCP.

Below that is a section that has Past Events, and then each Marque gets it own section. As time goes on, each marque will have more and more albums populated.

You can also add comments for user's photo's if you wish.

[Tom]

The Garage

The Garage is one of the newest additions to the site. It has replaced the old vbGarage and Timeslips function we had.



Brief Overview of the main page:

• Top Links - These take you directly to the various sections of The Garage. From here you can (L to R)

Browse - Look through all of the Vehicles that members have added
Search - Search for a particular Vehicle
Insurance - Lists all the Insurance Companies that members use
Retail - All of the places members have bought items from
Garages - Places that have done installations
Timeslips - Drag Racing Timeslips
Dyno Charts - Dyno results from members
Laptime - Laptime results (as an overall view)
Track - Lists all the Tracks in the system, with Track Times from each user
Approvals - Lists any items that have to be approved, in particular, new Makes and Models if they aren't already in the database

• My Vehicles - Shows all the vehicles you have in your Garage
• Welcome Note - Just a quick note on this. Please read the section about image size. The maximum file size is 1024kb, and the actual picture dimensions cannot exceed 1024x768 pixels.
• Various pieces of information - As you scroll down the page, there will be a basic listing of the various sections, as an overview

To add a new vehicle to your Garage

Click on the button shown in the above image marked "New Vehicle"



This will bring up a new area, as shown:



Fill out all the [Required] details, and anything else that you wish. The description pane doesn't have to list everything you have, there is another section for adding modifications, if you wish. If your Make or Model isn't listed, click on the link that says "Not Listed?" and add it in. I manually approve each new Model or Make and make sure its in the correct format. Once added, you are presented with a screen, such as this:



From here, I will explain what each of the buttons underneath your car mean

• Edit Vehicle - This is where you edit that particular vehicles entries. You can change the year etc and anything else in this area. This is also where you add new images.
• Delete Vehicle - Deletes the Vehicle
• New Modification - This area allows you to add any modification you have done to your car, Anything at all.
• New Premium - Add a new insurance premium to your vehicle
• New Timeslip - Just completed a drag race, add the timeslip here
• New Dyno Run - Same as above, you've just completed a new dyno run, you can post it here
• New Lap Time - Add your laptimes here
• Add Service - If you have just had your car serviced, you can add it here as a record-keeper

Once that is done, that is it! As time goes on, you can update and edit your vehicle/s. Think of it as an area for you to keep records on what has been done to your car.

[Tom]

Classifieds

The Classifieds has its own FAQ, please be sure to read through it thoroughly. And yes, its still only available for people with 90 days membership AND 50 posts.

[Tom]

We've added some Calendars which are there for users to post other clubs track days and what-not.

If you click on "Calendars" in the top navbar, you get taken to the main Calendar page. On the far right is a pulldown with the calendars we have just made (as shown).



To add a new event, click on the New Event button:



Fill out the details for the event and submit it. Now the event is going to be shown on the Forums front page.

[platypus]

Tom,
Whats the Facebook link about?

[Tom]

You can link your facebook account to your ECCA account now. There is also the option to not sign on to ECCA (for new people), as they could, in theory, sign up to ECCA via their facebook account.

Having said that, its the only function it does, link your facebook account to your ECCA account. There are plans to do more, but thats it really, for now.

[davey]

Connected via Facebook.. just not sure why

[platypus]

hey i just realised my facebook profile pic has transferred over to here... creeepy

[davey]

Just a quick note.. The link to classifieds FAQ above is broken.