Back in January '08 a hacker visited our board and was somehow able to attach a virus or an automatic link to a site which would then start downloading viruses to anyone who subsequently visited the page.  So if you went to look at the digital winners for the month, the viruses would begin downloading to your computer.  Once we discovered this, we cut all the links from our web site to the old bulletin board.  We also ended up deleting the board because we couldn't figure out how to clean the virus off the pages and more importantly how to prevent a reoccurrence.  We spent several months trying to get another bulletin board in place but the hosting company's bulletin board would not function according to their specifications and after many months and many requests for support we were told that the hosting company's bulletin board would not work and that there was no support to make their version function correctly.  This ended up being a frustrating waste of time and a considerable delay, however, one of the tech support folks suggested we look into "phpBB".  We checked it out, found out that it was working and that there appears to be considerable support for this particular board.  We got a web developer to install the board, check all the database tables and do an initial configuration.  We've spent quite a bit of time fine tuning the configuration and tailoring the features to our Camera Club's needs.  We have high hopes for our new board.  It has many powerful features and best of all, our members can easily post their images and continue a photography dialog through our online community.

When you register, the webmaster verifies that you are a West Oakland Camera Club member before allowing you to post to the bulletin board. The old board would let anyone post anything.  By requiring registration and verification we should be able to stop spammers and hackers who could otherwise post offensive advertisements and/or viruses.

Yes you can and it's not too hard to do (Note: this assumes you've registered and the web guy has verified that you're a West Oakland member). When you're typing up your post click the "Img" button, then near the bottom of the page click on the "Upload attachment" tab. Then click the "Browse" button and navigate to the folder on your computer which has the image you want to post. Select the image file by clicking on it then click the "Open" button. Next, click the "Add the file" button. If the board asks if you want to display the image "inline" generally the answer is yes. Your image will be uploaded from your computer the the bulletin board and you can then complete your message, preview it and submit it to the bulletin board. When you preview your post, your image will appear and of course, once you submit your post and it's on the board, the image will appear (assuming it's not too large).  Image sizes are limited to 400 x 400 pixels, less than 250K bytes and must be .jpg or .gif file types.

(After you've registered and your account has been activated...)   The best way is to go to the board, click on the Announcements forum and then click the "Subscribe Forum" text at the bottom left on the Announcements Forum page and you should be notified via e-mail when ever there is a new post/announcement attached to this forum. Please note, you won't receive the actual announcement, but you will receive notification that a new announcement has been posted to the board and you can click on the link in the e-mail notification to take you to Announcements forum so you can check out the new post. If you want to have the notifications go to your work e-mail and your home e-mail you will need to register twice, using different user names.

To try to 1) keep the number of announcements and e-mail load to a minimum and, 2) to see that important club announcements are not lost in a blizzard of notifications, posting to the Announcements forum is (for the time being) reserved for officers and competition committee members. If you have an important announcement, please forward your suggested announcement a club officer or competition committee member. Thanks.

To 1) maintain order in the Digital Competition forum, which is important if club members want to easily search by month and category and 2) to try to keep the image storage on the hosting server below the club's limit before surcharges apply, we have (for the time being) limited posting to this forum to Joe (Canon) S.