We ran a "yellow notice" on the website to let people know of the team membership program. Unfortunately, more than a few browsers simply won't display that yellow notice. So I have decided to write a little bit about it here.
You may have seen some of our members with special titles like "Gunnutz", "Super Gunnutz" and "Uber Super Gunnutz" and wonder what they are. These are the special titles of team members. The team membership was started a few years ago because a lot of members wanted to directly support the forum. Hence it was born
In addition to the special titles, team members have enhanced EE privileges, such as more permitted ads and faster bump time. The most useful feature is the much bigger storage space for picture attachment. Regular members with EE access can upload and store 3 to 5 pictures, but team members basically have enough space not to worry about that most of the time. The picture attachment also works within PM.
Team members also have enhanced PM box features, such as auto reply. If you are on vacation and have lots of EE things going on, it is a useful thing to have. There are also many other additional features, such as account recovery. The forum periodically received emails from people asking for help to recover their accounts, but this cannot be done before the forum cannot verify who you are. Only members who have team membership can take advantage of account recovery. This is because only the store has the member information and can verify identity.
This is how it works. The webstore www.cgnapparel.com is a completely separate entity from the CGN forum - physically and legally. The store only process orders, that is it. When you sign up a team membership at the webstore, none of the forum moderators and IT staff have access to your information in the store. When a team member needs an account recovery, the store works as a 3rd party to vouch for the identity of the requester and basically ONLY give the forum a "good to go" stamp on the request.
Because of this deliberate separation between the forum and the store ( to protect our members information ) , team membership update is not quite instantaneous by design. The account is not instantly update once the purchase is made at the store. It takes up to a business day ( most of the time it is done within 12 hours) because the forum needs to receive the email address from the store to look up for the account and also to see if the account can be updated ( for example, an account that is on the way to getting banned cannot buy its way out ). Once you see the account title is changed to "Gunnutz", "Super Gunnutz" and "Uber Super Gunnutz" , this means the account is updated.
I hope this answers some of the questions about team members, what it does, how it works. If you would like to see more details and support the forum, here is a link to the store:
https://www.cgnapparel.com/collectio...ership-program