[A1990]

I will try to explain this the best I can. Obviously the hardest part of the renewal process is logging into the Registry website. Members don't do it that often and the password is not remembered.

Once you know your password or reset it, the process it fairly straight forward, go to the store, add the membership renewal, fill out the required information, checkout with PayPal and you're done.

Now the back story. Dave Bright developed the website for the Registry almost 20 years ago and the Forum much later. They were never designed to "talk" to each other and in fact are even stored on the same server with the same internet provider. At the same time any membership information including name, address, when you joined, etc....I mean ANYTHING at all was transcribed into an Access database that didn't talk to the website or the forum.. This process was very time consuming and labor intensive for those that tracked this information.

In 2012 it was decided to create a new website that could track membership information for us. We wanted to maintain the information contained in the original website, but at the same time eliminate all the manual work to track memberships. When the new website was created and the membership database imported we had to come up with a username for each member. Hence the firstnamelastname user names we have today.

During late 2013 the Registry website was attacked by a Bot that started creating user accounts on our website at an alarming rate. After consulting with a website development firm, it was determined the best way to stop this Bot was to extend the password to 11 characters. Fortunately this did stop the Bot and still today we are trying to determine which accounts still need to be deleted from our system. Hint: One easy way to create a long password is to use password padding. This means to add characters in your password that repeat and are easy to remember. Example: zR0ne$$$$$$ is a easy password to remember and meets our criteria.

When we were redesigning the website, we knew that the forum would still be in a different programming language, still on a different server unless we implemented a new forum within our new website. We considered that option, however in doing so we would have had to "freeze" the current forum in order to maintain all the history as it would have been very expensive to convert with no guarantees that it would convert correctly. With that in mind we elected not to convert and to leave the systems as they are today.

We did update the software on our website and asked if it would be possible to implement a "single signon" solution. We were quoted that it would be between $2000-$5000 to accomplish this. We elected not to do that at this point.

So now you all know a lot of the backstory. Do we have a perfect system? No. Is there a lot going on in the background on the website and forum? Yes.

I hope that helps everyone understand why it is like it is.

I am open to any comments or suggestions.