Introducing BYOND Member Services!

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Jul 3 2013, 4:25 am (Edited on Jul 3 2013, 4:33 am)
Greetings,

I have had the idea to do this for a while, since right after BYOND took away their blog functionality. Recently, I started talking with a few people around BYOND who thought this could be a pretty cool idea, so I have been working the past few days on getting these services setup.



What will be offered?
BYOND Members will be eligible to sign up for either a free CPanel hosting account with 250 MB of space -or- a Wordpress Blog with 100 MB of upload space, packed with themes and plugins already installed with more available by request. Upgrades/Additional features will be available at a small fee.

I probably should have started off by saying that I am not in this for profit of any kind, any money generated will be placed immediately back into these services and, if it ever grows large enough, directly back into BYOND.

What do I need now?

Simple, I'm nearing the point where I am comfortable opening this up for testers, anyone who is accepted as a tester and who actually tests the stability of the services will receive a free upgrade once these services go live.

The Process:
1) User signs up on the main member services website, providing their BYOND Key (for verification of free orders) and/or their Country/ZIP/Valid Phone Number (for automated fraud check on paid orders).

2) An Administrator (currently, just me) will contact you on the BYOND pager verify your current BYOND Membership (if you are signing up for a free account, paid accounts are created automatically and immediately after payment clears.)

3) If everything is okay, I approve your account and emails are sent out with your account details.

===============================
Project Phases
Phase 1) Closed Testing - Starts, hopefully, in the next few days - Lasts ~2 weeks - All may apply, but only a select few will be allowed in.

Phase 2) Beta Testing - Lasts ~2 weeks - ~50 slots opened.

Phase 3) Grand Opening - Spots will be opened until server reaches ~80% capacity.
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Important Notice

Currently, I am the only person involved with this, and seeing as how it will be a mostly free service, support is going to be pretty limited. Anyone will have the option of opening a support ticket, however I currently work a full-time job that has been mandating overtime and have a few active web development projects on the side. While I will make a 'best effort' to reply to any opened support tickets in a timely manner, this service will best fit with people who aren't afraid to use google to answer their questions.

Anyways, if you are interested in testing either the blog functionality, or the hosting functionality (or both!) please either reply to this post, or send me a page. I will respond as soon as possible.

Thanks,
SnipeDragon

Disclaimer - BYOND Member Services are not affiliated or directly related to BYOND, these services are ran completely independent of BYOND.


Jul 3 2013, 4:32 am
Sounds like a great service to me, help restore some of the uniqueness that was lost along with the byond's personal blog pages. Sign me up to test the blog aspect when you're ready.
Jul 3 2013, 10:37 am
Yut Put wrote:

I really, really like this color scheme. Now I wish this is what the website looked like.

Please, put this in feature requests maybe they will change the color.
Jul 3 2013, 11:05 am
Finally something other than connecting to games faster, making hubs and a display picture. ;o
Jul 3 2013, 11:07 am
Mind if i join?
Jul 3 2013, 11:20 am
That color scheme. Loving it!!!

Nice idea. Hope all goes well for you Snipe.
Jul 3 2013, 12:38 pm
When do I get to throw my money at you for hosting services?
Jul 3 2013, 4:15 pm
I've thought over something similar to the blog side of this a few times, but I knew I wouldn't be able to execute the idea properly, and I figured others probably considered it as well.

So, needless to say, I love the idea. Looks like you're executing it quite nicely as well. I won't worry about getting into the testing, but I will be checking out how this is going from time to time. I hope it goes well, and good luck!
Jul 3 2013, 7:35 pm
The more I start setting this up, the more I am thinking about dropping the CPanel hosting aspect and just hosting the blogs. By doing this, the service will be cheaper to run and I can instead upgrade the amount of storage space that I have (leading to more sites).

Currently, the blogs all allow one login, meaning once you register on the main site, you can login on any member/game blog with the same account. The main blog keeps track of posts network-wide, meaning that popular posts can be featured on the main blog.

Right now I have ~140 WordPress themes installed to choose from and I am installing several plugins that I think will be useful.

I'll go ahead and post the link to the primary blog, any blog you sign up for will have a sub-domain off of this site:

http://www.byondblog.me

This is still very much a work-in-progress (as you can tell from the default text that still plagues the site.)

Would anyone object to me dropping the CPanel hosting aspect and focusing solely on blogs, at least for now? I wouldn't mind opening up additional services in the future.
Jul 3 2013, 7:45 pm
In response to SnipeDragon
SnipeDragon wrote:
The more I start setting this up, the more I am thinking about dropping the CPanel hosting aspect and just hosting the blogs. By doing this, the service will be cheaper to run and I can instead upgrade the amount of storage space that I have (leading to more sites).

Currently, the blogs all allow one login, meaning once you register on the main site, you can login on any member/game blog with the same account. The main blog keeps track of posts network-wide, meaning that popular posts can be featured on the main blog.

Right now I have ~140 WordPress themes installed to choose from and I am installing several plugins that I think will be useful.

I'll go ahead and post the link to the primary blog, any blog you sign up for will have a sub-domain off of this site:

http://www.byondblog.me

This is still very much a work-in-progress (as you can tell from the default text that still plagues the site.)

Would anyone object to me dropping the CPanel hosting aspect and focusing solely on blogs, at least for now? I wouldn't mind opening up additional services in the future.

I think, more people will go after the hosting.
Jul 4 2013, 12:53 am
Sign me up! Happy to use WordPress, and keen to blog a bit about my current progress. I ran a WordPress blog a long ways back, and got 5k+ visitors, so I'm happy to give a thorough testing.

(Link to my old blog for verification: 1000reasonstohavesex - just about SFW (references of a sexual nature, but no nsfw images))
Jul 4 2013, 1:08 am
I WANT MY SHELL!
Jul 4 2013, 2:51 am
Update 7/4/13: Closed testing is now live. If you are interested please register for an account at http://www.byondblog.me and then start a pager conversation with me. Selected members will receive the coupon needed to sign up for their own blog.

In addition, I think I am going to accept bitcoins as a form of payment. I have applied for a merchant account with bitpay, if that goes through then I will integrate bitcoins in as a payment method.
Jul 5 2013, 2:34 pm
Definitely need to make this use BYOND keys as a login instead of asking users to input their key. This can easily be accomplished by using DMCGI to set a cookie on a successful login and validating that cookie with whatever language you're using for the main stuff.
Jul 5 2013, 4:18 pm
In response to Nadrew
Nadrew wrote:
Definitely need to make this use BYOND keys as a login instead of asking users to input their key. This can easily be accomplished by using DMCGI to set a cookie on a successful login and validating that cookie with whatever language you're using for the main stuff.

True dat.
Jul 16 2013, 9:30 pm
In response to King_LiOnZ
King_LiOnZ wrote:
I WANT MY SHELL!

._. That's odd. I offered you one. >.> lol.
Jul 16 2013, 9:43 pm
Well, I signed up. I'd like to see what this is all about. It seems interesting. I miss the blogs with the whole CSS customization part of it too.

Edit: That color scheme is really fantastic.. man.. *drewls*
Jul 16 2013, 11:06 pm
SnipeDragon, the site is covered with spambots! :(
Jul 16 2013, 11:17 pm
In response to Ease
Ease wrote:
SnipeDragon, the site is covered with spambots! :(

Jul 16 2013, 11:49 pm
To deal with spam bots I recommend a security question that can't be answered by Google like,

"Which of These words Is capitalized?"

You don't even have to randomize it, unless your site is being specifically targeted they'll never figure it out.

I personally use one that doesn't follow any valid language rules but most people with more than a second grade education can figure out where I'm going:

"Which word in this Sentence is a proper noun?"

'Sentence' being the answer, but it's not really a proper noun, I just capitalized it to force a human reaction to the question, never had any complain that it wasn't working.
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