Website Overview

Invision Community

This website is managed by the Caterham and Lotus Seven Club. It is a cloud hosted platform provided by Invision Community (Invision). Invision writes the software that creates the site (in PHP) and provides online and email support to the Club.

The site comprises a "front-end" that members can log into and navigate around, and a "back-end" admin section that Club administrators use to configure and manage the website.

Some of the features (Invision calls them applications) are "native" features written by Invision, such as Forums, Events, Blogs and Areas and Groups (which Invision calls Clubs). Other features of the site have been created by the Club using Invision's "front-end" database system, for instance News, Website Help, Technical Guides, Speed Competitors etc.

Most of the site content can have a reaction applied to it and some sections can have comments added by members. Almost all content can be followed which will then produce a notification when that content changes or is added to. Whole topics, blogs, areas/groups, calendars etc can be followed along with individual posts, events, area news items etc. Notifications can be in-site, by email or by push notification.

This incarnation of the Club website was migrated from a Drupal site in the Autumn of 2023. Prior to that the site was migrated from BlatChat to Drupal in 2014. As of Autumn 2023 the site has around 200,000 forum topics and 2,000,000 posts on those topics.

A brief overview of each of the site features is given below as well as there being detailed instructions on various topics in the Website Help system.

Storage Limits

Each member has a 750MB storage allowance on the website. This includes images and documents.

Uploads

Members can upload attachments to forums topic, forum posts, blog entries and comments. Each upload can be up to 10MB.

Image uploads are resized to a maximum of 2500 x 1800 pixels. If you'd like to make higher resolution images available then please state that in your post and for others to contact you privately for a high res version.

Videos can be linked inside website content. The website provides an in-page video viewer allowing a video to be watched without leaving the site. Video uploads are not allowed - the admins view is that video storage services such as YouTube and Vimeo are well understood by our members and that providing video storage would create an unnecessary storage burden on the website.

Profile

Each member has a Profile page that can be accessed by clicking on the member's profile picture. 

A Profile page shows details about the member and allows other members to follow them.

Forums - BlatChat

The website forums are provided as a dedicated feature by the Invision platform. 

Forums are governed by the Code of Conduct and Moderated by a team of moderators, see below. 

Most forums are visible to non-members, except for ChitChat (members only) and some forums used by Club Officers and the Leadership Team.

The Forums system allows for Topics which are replied to with Posts. Quoting of posts is supported. Topics may pinned, featured and locked by Admins.

Reactions can be used to indicate whether a members likes, dislikes, is unhappy etc with the post. Currently the site does not use ratings for indicating how strongly members "rate" content on the site (a concept that extends beyond just forum topics and posts). Reacting to a member's content increases their rating. 

Blogs

Blogs is another dedicated Invision feature and the content of the blogs was also transferred from the previous Drupal website.

Each member has the ability to create a single blog, after which a member can add a "Blog Entry" to that blog. 

Messaging

Members can send Private Messages to other members or lists of members. 

Members can:

• Start up to 25 conversations per day and one conversation per minute
• Send a message to up-to 10 recipients at once.
• Have 200 conversations active.
• Upload attachments to messages.

Notifications

For all of the content you follow, private messages you receive or contact from the admins, a notification can be created. Each content type (followed content, messages, event reminders etc) can have how notifications are sent configured.

You can chose to receive notifications in a number of ways (each content type has different options):

• Notification List - The bell icon in the top right of the website where a bubble is shown with the number of notifications you have next to the bell icon in the top right of the website page. 
• Daily Email
• Weekly email
• Push notifications (if you have the web app installed - see below)

News

Club news is uploaded by site admins to a front-end database and into various Club related categories.

Currently, once a month a news item is added with the headlines of this month's Lowflying magazine. 

Member's Discounts

The member's discounts pages show a front-end database of the currently active member's discounts negotiated by the Club. Categories are used to help navigate the many discounts.

Galleries

Galleries are collections of albums curated by the Club admins. The curration has been implemented to limit the scale of uploaded content and one album will be created where images have been provided for an event.

Members can contact a site admin (see Staff Page) to request creation of an album.

Speed

The Speed section contains both general Speed Championship information, including event venues, as well as detailed records of previous and current years competitions.

Tours

On these pages you'll find information about upcoming tours. Tours will also be listed in the Events calendars.

Track

The Track section contains general information about the track-day program put on by the Club each year, as well as links to track venues that the program regularly visits.

Areas and Groups

The Areas and Groups section is a list of both the local area groups (split roughly by membership size and then by countries outside the UK) as well as Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for interest areas that span the whole club.

Members can chose to join any Area they wish - there is no restriction to just joining the group you are geographically located in. However, it is advisable to keep the number of joined groups to a reasonable limit, perhaps the ones around where you live or visit frequently.

Each Area/Group has the following tabs:

• Overview - where you can see activity within this group (blog posts etc)
• Members - a list of the people who have joined the area
• News Blog - where the area representative can make posts about local (area) events, and news.

Some areas also support a Forum that is being trialled as of November 2023.

Note: Joining an Area or Group is different from following it. 

• Joining: By joining the area/group you are given access to that part of the website. 
• Following: When you follow sections of the area/group you will then be sent notifications of new area/group content and changes.

Joining an area/group does not automatically mean you are following the content of the area/group.

Events

The Events system is an Invision built in feature. The system is comprised of number of Calendars, each of which contains Events.

There is a Calendar for each of the Areas, Groups and Club Events (track, speed, national etc).

Members can save events and calendars to their own device (PC, Mac, Phone or Tablet). Events can be saved as:

• iCalendar Event - download a snapshot of a calendar or event. This can then be added to your device. Note that this is not a dynamic feed and will not be updated with changes to the calendar or event.
• iCalendar Feed - the website provides a link that can be added to your devices calendar app. If you subscribe to event then changes to the event will be reflected in your devices calendar app. If you subscribe to a calendar then new events, event deletions and event changes will be reflected in your device's calendar app. This is the recommended way of keeping track of events on your own devices.

Merchandise

Clicking the merchandise link will open the Club's merchandise partner's merchandise micro-site. These micro-sites are managed by the merchandise partner.

Member's Documents

This is where you'll find Club documents.

Staff Directory

On this page you'll find a list of all Club officers and admin staff. (Coming soon) You'll also be able to see their name and role within the Club.

You can message each club officer from this page.

Moderation

The Invision system has a set of in-built moderation tools. Flagging a moderation request will automatically notify the moderation team who have a dedicated administration section to mange moderation request.

WebApp

This website supports using the site through a downloaded web application, also known as a Progressive Web Application (PWA).

Once downloaded to your device you can click on the WebApp icon to open a new dedicated web browser. This lets you interact with the Club website as though it has a Club app on your phone, tablet etc. You can think of it as being the next step on from bookmarking the website in our browser.

Once installed, the WebApp can be used to navigate and interact with the website along with getting "push notifications" from the website (which need to be enabled in your device's settings and on the websites Notifications Settings page). Push notifications are how applications on your device (phone, tablet etc) send you pop-ups about things. For instance this is how Facebook sends you messages about updates on Facebook.

See: Adding the WebApp to your device.

Support

The Support section of the website shows you staff listings, website help and other features.