Members Information Functions

Member Information

This is where you can enter a member's user ID or email address. By then pulling up a member you can edit any of their info or delete the member by clicking the remove member link on the result page that comes up. You can also add a brand new member directly from there as well.

Membership Levels

The membership levels link will take you to the area where you can add or edit the free membership & any upgraded membership levels. By clicking edit on any of the memberships you can then set the cost, how often you want to charge for an upgraded membership, lifetime for a one time fee, or monthly or yearly. You can set up whether or not you want members of each level to get random referrals. The rank option lets you determine how frequently each membership will be assigned random referrals via a number where 1 is the lowest.

The Level Upgrade Page Text area is the html code which gives a description of what the specific membership level offers. If you are not very familiar with html you may want to leave this alone. You would want to hit the Continue link to continue editing the info. The next page allows you to set up the % of hits earned for members via their downline activity.

 Default Referrer

This is simply the member number you want to get any random referrals if you don't offer random referrals or don't have a lot of upgraded members. It is set up for member 1000 by default as that is also the administration account initially set up. This can of course be changed to any member number that you would like it to be.

Administration Email

This area is pretty straight forward. You can send an email to an individual member, or to all members. Just enter the subject line & then the text you want to appear in the email.

Traffic Site Functions

Stats Email

Directly under the Traffic Site Functions heading you will see a Last Stats Email listing & a compose and send now link. By clicking the link you can then send a special email to all members which will update them on their stats. It will show members their personal credits earned, referral credits earned, credits used & credits available. It will also show the member the total number of sites they have set up as well as their user ID & password. These are informative, but keep them to a minimum as too many of them can be very annoying to members!

Site Maintenance

Here you can add a new site & enter the info under any member number wanted. You can view all sites for any member by entering their member number or email address. You can also pull up any individual site by entering the site number.

Pending Sites, Hotlinks & Banners

If any new hotlinks or banner impressions are waiting for you to review they will show in this area under Traffic Site Functions at the very top & will show as Pending. You can then review & approve them to put them into rotation or deny them by removing them. If any sites are reported as causing a problem or breaking your site terms they will also show here as pending for review. In your webmaster email address you get an auto email each time a new site is added, a new person joins your program, or there are site reports. You can review the email from there for the reason for the site report & test the reported site yourself. Remember members get to automatically approve their sites as long as they are not frame breakers after 30 seconds, but that doesn't mean their site is necessarily appropriate so it is important to surf frequently yourself & rely on member to report any sites causing problems. When you click the Report button from the surfing frame it will give members a list of the last 5 sites visited so this makes things very easy to find problem sites!

Site Bans

Here is where you can enter the URL of a site that you would like to ban from the program. Once it has been entered, when a member tries to put a banned site into rotation the script will of course inform them that they can't add it. Enter the Site Address without the http:// part: (www.Heavy.com)

Banner Maintenance

Here you can enter a member's email address or user number to view an individual member's banners. You can also display ALL  banners which are set up to be shown on the surfing frame. This area ONLY deals with banners which will be shown on the surfing frame. Members get the ability to list their banners here to be shown on the surfing frame as long as they are active & have credits available in their account. The very cool thing is, that these banner impressions are absolutley free to members & do not use any of their credits. These are completely different than the rotating banners you see at the top of all the site pages. Those will be covered in a different section.

Hotlink Maintenance

Here you can add text links that will show on the surfing frame. You also can view all hotlinks at once. Like the banner impressions on the surfing frame these are free for active members & do not use any type of credits. They will be in rotation as long as the member is active & has credits available in their account.

Credit Maintenance

In the credit maintenance area you  have a credit report link which will show you a reporting of the credit status of all members. The Join Bonus Not collected shows you members that joined but have not yet surfed enough sites to qualify as active & get their signup bonus. The credit check gives yet another in depth accounting of members, their sites, when they last visited, how many credits are available etc. 

You can enter any member number or member email and see the available credits they have and have used when clicking the retrieve member button. You will also see a credit adjustment blank area. You can add credits to any member's account here by entering the number of credits you wish to add, you can subtract credits by placing a minus sign in front of the number such as -100 & this will decrease credits of a member. When selling credits to members this is where you go to add their credits to their account. If the member has auto credit allocation set for on it will automatically distribute the new credits among their sites. If they don't have the auto allocation on then their credits will be available in their account for them to allocate at their convenience. 

  Traffic Control

This area is where you control a lot of important site variables. The Site Visits to Collect Join Bonus are the credits a new member gets after they visit a number of sites. This is where you set that number. The Ratio Increase Percentage is the surf ratio bonus a member gets after surfing so many sites. Default is set at 5%. The next variable: Ratio Increase Visits is the number of sites a member must surf to then get the increased surf ratio percentage set just above. The Next Day Percentage is the surf ratio percentage increase the member will automatically enjoy the following day and the Next Day Increase Visits are the number of sites the member must surf to get the bonus for tomorrow. Default is set up for a 10% surf ratio increase the next day every 50 sites visited. 

The Security Check Number variable controls how often the captcha numbers come up on the surfing frame that a member must enter to continue surfing. The lower the number the more frequently this security check will come up. Increase this number if you think this is showing up too often when surfing. The next two variables control the color of the surfing frame & the color of the text seen on the surfing frame such as the surf timer counter. Using the hexadecimal system you can make these two any colors you can imagine. Do a google search to find out more info and what code will make which color if you are not too familiar with this.

The bottom set of variables control the length of the surf frame timer, base surf ratio, the signup bonus credits & credits a member gets when they refer someone else as well as the number of sites each member can promote. You can set these for free members and all upgraded memberships. The number of sites you set for each membership will be the same number of banners & hotlinks members can set up on the surfing frame. After clicking on a type of membership, such as the gold membership for instance, you can also add the number of credits a member will automatically receive monthly as a result of their membership. You can set up free members to receive automatic free credits monthly if you wish as well.      

Stats Maintenance

This is where you set up all the variables for the member surfing contests. You can set up daily,  weekly, & monthly surfing contests. You can have all three types available or any combination of the three. You set the dates for the monthly & weekly contests to end. Once this is set the script should automatically reset these variables & assign the credits each time the contest ends and a new one begins. You can award up to 10 prizes, and can show stats of up to the top 10 members in each of the contests. You can choose to only award 1 prize, or 3 or up to 10. Just enter the number of credits you want to give to winning members for each specific contest.

Surf Image Maintenance

This section allows you to place the images you want shown when members are surfing. Obviously if you are happy with what is there then there is nothing else you need to do. If you do want to customize these images I would recommend you use images no more than 50 x 50 in pixels. Generally the smaller the better. If you plan to replace these images, you will need to upload the images to your site which you can do through cpanel or using ftp software. Once the images have been uploaded you just want to change the image URL to direct to where you saved them.

 Surfing Bonus Setup

This section allows you to give extra bonus credits to members who will be randomly awarded one of the three credit amounts you choose as they surf. The more they surf the more often they will encounter this random award. The surfing image link is to put a graphic image that will appear at the top of the white page they will see that tells them they won some random credits.

Misc Administration Functions  

Turn Signups Off

When you click this link it will prevent new members from joining. The only time you would really need to do this would be if you were doing some type of work directly with the MySQL Database & wanted to make sure no new members were joining until your database work was done. Should be very rare that you would ever use this. If you do click it, you then have to click the link again to turn the signup ability back on.

Suspend Site

This link too should be very rarely if ever used. This will literally close the entire site & prevent members or any visitors from being able to do anything with your site. The idea here is if say you were doing some major overhaul of the site pages or script in some way this gives you a way to keep people out until you are ready for them again. Clicking the link turns the site off, clicking it again turns the site back on.

Meta Tags

Used by search engines to list your site. This area lets you set up keywords as well as a description of your site that search engine spiders can index.

Upload Graphics

This option will allow you to upload image files from your computer to the images directory. The image directory must be set to CHMOD 777 full permissions to work properly. This is Turned Off by default to prevent hackers from having a method of uploading files directly to your website. If you need help getting images uploaded to your site let us know. 

FAQ Maintenance

This is where you can add or edit any Frequently Asked Questions that you would like to post answers to so members can refer easily there for answers to questions they may have. A few basic ones are already listed. You can add categories & add all the info you would like & it becomes immediately viewable on the FAQ page for anyone to view.

Rotating Banners

This is where you control the banners that are rotated at the top of all site pages. These are completely separate from the free rotating banners members can submit for the surfing frame. Here you can add or edit any rotating banners. You must give the banner a name, you can add the member's number so the stats will be available for their banner advertisement in their member area. You can add the number of impressions to be shown or put simply as 0 for unlimited impressions. You can also choose a date for the banner to stop being shown vs. a number of displays should you want to offer banner ads for time periods. The banner type can be Graphic & Forwarding URL in which case you would enter the website address people will be directed to when clicking the banner under the forwarding URL space. The graphic URL is the actual URL for the banner itself. This link should always end in .gif or .jpg & should always result in a graphic image. We highly recommend sticking to 468 x 60 pixel images as this was the space this area was designed for.

The Text and Forwarding URL option will allow you to use a text message vs. an actual graphic image. In this case you would leave the graphic url area blank & use the text ad lines 1 & or 2 & 3 for whatever text message is to be displayed. The forwarding URL should still be filled in for the website address members are sent to when clicking on the text link. The final option is the Full Banner URL. For this you would only fill out the Full Banner URL area with the total code all together. This would include the html code which will specify an <img src= link & an <a> for anchor code. If you are not familiar with placing banners in this way you may want to avoid this option. 

 Advertising Options

This is where you set up all the advertising options you want to offer to members. You can add different categories & different options under each any time you wish to. You would give the option a name, cost, set the frequency of payment from one time to a recurring subscription as you wish. Add a description of what is for sale, & the option sort area lets you assign a number or letter to the option which will then categorize it in order under the specific category it was set up in.

 The area at the bottom lets you offer what options you ask for in the form the member or advertiser will fill out when placing their order. If you want to sell banner advertising, you will want to ask for the forwarding URL & the banner graphic URL for example. In another area described below it will explain how to set up paypal & alertpay options for payment. When you create an advertising option, the script will automatically write the paypal or alertpay code to create buttons for the specific advertising option & price. Once your advertising option is created & saved, it is immediately available for anyone to purchase, paypal buttons &all.

Popular advertising options of course are credits, rotating banner impressions, login splash advertising where you can set up an image that is seen when members first log in, as well as permanent upgraded memberships. There is an upgrade page that members will see in their members area if they are free members. When they click the link they are taken to a page explaining the upgrade options & paypal and or alertpay buttons will be there waiting for them. So, you don't have to worry about adding upgraded membership options to the advertising options section unless you specifically want to. 

Site Promo Banners

This is where the banners available for members to use for promoting their referral link for your program are added. You can upload a banner directly from your computer to the images folder from here, & you will then be given the URL for that banner image. Again, your images folder must be set up for full permissions for this to work & this is set to off by default for security purposes. When adding a new image, you put the banner url to be the link given to you where it is saved on the site & then you need to add the pixel size for the width & height. Again 468 width & 60 height is the most common. It is always a good idea to add other size images to give members a lot of flexibility for promoting your site. Again let me know if you need help adding new images to the site. Three Banners come automatically with your site so that there is nothing else you absolutely have to do in this area unless you want to add some more.  

Splash Pages

Splash pages are quick loading short pages that many members will find useful for promoting your program. This area is designed for you to add a Graphic Image URL which will be incorporated into a splash page. Here is how it works: first add the image you want to be on your splash page. That means you must add a file ending in .gif or .jpg. If you try to add a text file, or html file it will result in an ugly broken link. Make an image 300 x 500, or whatever size within this range that you like. If you are not experienced with creating images let me know. Once you have an image created to promote your site, upload it, & then save the URL which will be given to you for linking to where the image is saved on your site. Then click on Add a new splash page, name your splash page & insert that URL to the splash graphic URL space  & save. This will automatically place a splash page referral link in Every member's member area. The script will place the member's name on the splash page along with the image you just set up. The script will do all this for you, it will customize the splash page for every single member's specific referral code & read their name from the database. There is nothing else you need to do to make this work.

Site Promo Pages

This is where you set up the advertisements that members are directed to when they first log in. You can use a splash image or a banner image, whatever type of image you like. Again this must be a graphic url ending in .gif or .jpg for this to work right. Add a new image, name it, put the member number of the member ordering it, the number of displays purchased and the forwarding & graphic URLs to set it up. You can have multiple ads here which are rotated as members log in. When someone is ordering this advertising option make sure you explain to them they need to provide you with a graphic file vs. an html type of page for it to work.

Pending Ad Orders

When someone orders an advertising option from the site, they are first instructed to fill out a form supplying you with the information you need to set up their ad. This form is sent to this area of your administration section for you to review & set up. In addition, you should be getting an email from paypal or alertpay which will also confirm you received a payment. ALWAYS make sure you see the $ for this order in your paypal account first before setting it up. If this area is blank then you have no pending orders waiting for review & placement. You can go to your advertising page from the site & click on an advertisement order & fill out the form & submit it to see how this all works. The next step an advertiser sees is a link to your paypal or alertpay buttons to pay for their order, so sometimes you may have ads showing up here that have not actually been paid for so again make sure it is a legitimate order you have been paid for before setting it up!

 Payment Options

Now the fun part, getting paid. This is where you will add your payment options to the site. The script is set up to recognize Alertpay, Paypal & Stormpay. As of this time Stormpay is not processing any new orders, so you are basically looking at paypal & alertpay. For paypal, you have one time, monthly & yearly options. For each option that you may want to offer, you click on the edit link next to the option & enter the paypal email address you want payments to go to. For Alertpay, this only works for their one time payment options. If you want to offer a subscription payment option via alertpay it can't be done automatically by the script because of the way they do their code, so stick with one time payment options only if using alertpay.

 Income Management

This function is specifically for site owners who want to offer some type of cash rewards to members. Perhaps you want to offer a share of the income revenue on advertising options, or for referring members who upgrade or whatever. This is where you can record income from a member & record any payments you make to them. This is set up only for you to record this info for your records and does not automatically credit any member money. I would recommend avoiding bringing real cash sharing into the mix for a number of reasons, but if you wish to do so you can record this information here.

Banned IPs

As this function's name would suggest, you can ban the IP of any member by entering their IP to the banned list. In addition, you can redirect this member to another website when they try to visit your site once they have been banned. This can be really fun, LOL. When a member joins you get an email in your webmaster email address. It will give you the IP the member used to join. Now say the same guy from South Korea joins 10 times with 10 different email addresses but all the same IP. This is clearly someone trying to cheat. How do you stop him from joining 150 times? Simply enter his IP to ban him. For further fun, set your redirect URL to fbi.gov & watch the cheaters run! If you are not familiar with IPs, it is always a long number, & is tied to their internet provider they use. Most of the time this should be a unique number for each user but sometimes the same IP can be seen with multiple members from one network or maybe a cable company ISP.

Banned Email

     As the name says, you can ban a member by placing their email address on the ban list here. Say you find a cheater & delete them from the program. Once they are no longer in the database, they could simply join again with same email, unless you ban their email  here.

  Site Advertising Campaigns

This is a unique feature of your site that allows you a way to track different advertising campaigns you may set up. Say you want to promote your site on Traffic-Crypt.com. You can create a special URL tied to the site you are going to be advertising on which will track the visit & record it for you. That way you will be able to see exactly how many real visitors you are getting to your link. To set this option up you would add the name of the site you are going to promote, (your traffic site for instance) your referral code, the name of the site you are advertising on, & their main url, http://traffic-crypt.com in this example, then you would put your username & passsword for your account with the site you are advertising on & enter the type of advertising you are doing. After filling all this in, save it & then it will create a URL you can place on the site you are advertising on which will then track all the visits you are receiving. This is a good way to compare your number with the number the place you are advertising on provides you to make sure it is the same and that you are getting what you paid for!

 Database Administration

When you click this link, it will pop up a new window, prompt you to login with your username & password for your cpanel area & will then take you to the PhpMyAdmin area of your cpanel which will give you direct access to the MySQL database. Be VERY CAREFUL in here if you don't know what you are doing! If you delete any info from your database then it is simply gone! This area is again password protected for your security. At the very bottom of this page I give you specific instructions on how to back up your database information so that you will always have a copy of all the database info. Browse to the bottom for that info. You should not have to do anything in this area other than database backups. This is why your admin area is so complex, so that you don't have to be a genius programmer to manipulate and save data for your site from this area!

Page and Email Text Maintenance

This last section of the admin area is where you can control the text & look of some of the very common and most visited site pages. Basic html knowledge is a huge plus when editing these pages. You may want to copy & paste the info from each of these pages & save them as text files to your computer before attempting to change anything so that you will have a backup. Please be sure to back the info up first in case you should accidentally delete any info!

Front Page

This is where you can edit all the text, look and feel of the home page index.php file. This is the page people are going to first when they visit your site. 

Program Information

This is where you can edit the text seen on the Program Info page. Normally this is a good place to explain what your site does, and perhaps the benefits of membership and upgraded memberships. Any changes made and saved become immediately visible to anyone visiting this page.

 Member News

This is where you can edit the text seen on the member's area main page. Add news members can see when they log in, instructions on how the member's section works etc. Again backup your info, and any saved changes become immediately visible to anyone in their member's area.

Contact Information

This is where you can edit any text you want seen on the Contacts page where members can fill out the form to contact you with any questions or comments.

Site Suspend

Here you can edit the text you would want displayed when members visit the site & you have the site suspended while doing work on the site. Again you probably won't be suspending the site too often but if you should, this is what would be displayed when people are visiting your site while it is down.

Agreement

This is where you can edit the text for the Terms of Agreement page.

Welcome Letter

This is where you can edit the text seen in the welcome email a new member receives after joining your site. You want to keep this short and to the point. Thanks for joining, give some benefits of being a member & tell them how they should visit & surf often & refer others!

This completes the breakdown of all the administration area functions. Now I will explain how to access the cpanel area of your webhosting account specifically to read emails set up for the webmaster email account & a few things you can do with your email. The cpanel setup is a very powerful set of tools and applications in itself. I will not go into detail about all the items in there but if you browse around & look at all the cpanel options you should be able for figure most of them out on your own.

 How To Access Email for Your Website

To access your email for the site you need to login to your cpanel area. This will be your website name with /cpanel at the end of it which you initially received in your site info email I sent you when you bought the site. Login using your cpanel username & password. Every site has a default webmail email address setup which is your cpanel username @ your websitename.com. Initially all your site emails & form info is going to your webmaster email address so follow these instructions to access your webmaster email:

1. Click on the Mail option at the top left.

2. Click the Add/Remove/Manage Accounts link.

3. You will see a Main Account & the webmaster email address listed below it. Click the Webmail link for the webmaster email address.

4. Then enter the password to access your email. This is initially set up to be the same password as you use for your cpanel access. Then click Login.

5. On the next page click on the Squirrel Mail icon.

6. You are now in your webmaster email account area. You can read, delete, or compose new emails from here. All emails sent from here by you will of course show they are coming from the webmaster account. From the cpanel Mail area from step number 1 you can set up email forwarding, set up auto responders, filtering options etc.

How To Backup the Database Information for Your Website 

Last & certainly not least, this will tell you step by step how to backup all the data in your database. This is probably the absolute most important thing you need to know how to do to run your site. If you do not backup your data every day or at least every few days & ever suffer a database loss, you will have NO WAY to replace it. That my friend, would simply suck. So, get in the habit of backing up your database every day. That way you will always have the latest copy of all data in your database should you ever be in a position where you would need to replace this information.

You can reach the area through the cpanel section via the MySQL Databases link, or much simpler, simply click the Database Administration link from your admin area of the site. When you do that, it will ask for your cpanel login info. Enter this & then you are right where you need to be to start.

1. Look to the very left menu area of this page. You will see phpMyAdmin & 4 little icon buttons below. Look right below there & you will see your database name with a number in parenthesis. Click this link.

2. Now in the main window that comes up look to the very top & find the Export link & click it.

3. To the left on the main window, you will see the word Export with a list of database tables in a box below it. Click the Select All link below this list of database tables which should highlight them all.

4. Scroll down & look right under this same area for a little white box with Save as file to the right. Click this box. Then look over to the right & click the Go button.

5. A file download box should pop up. When it does, click the save button on it.

6. Now choose a location on your computer where you want to save this file. This is a file you will be saving which will appear in text format which will contain all the code to replace your database info. Give your file a name & click save. This will then copy the file to your computer. You may want to create a special folder on your computer specifically to use for your database backup files. You can of course save them anywhere on your computer that you would like to store them.

You have now backed up your database. If you can do this every day, as I mentioned you will always have a good backup of the database which is up to date & you will not have to fear ever losing all your members due to a database loss. This is good common sense advice coming from someone that learned the hard way that if you don't back this info up & somehow lose it due to a server error from your web host that it can not be replaced any other way. While I do not believe you will likely ever encounter such a problem, it is always better to be safe than sorry!

If you have any other questions that are still not answered then please contact me.