While perhaps a little daunting at first, the image gallery is pretty straightforward to use. Under the covers, things are a bit more complicated as the page is actually implemented with multiple tables from our own user database, mixed with the filters selected by the user.

The first thing to notice is a title bar with the name User Gallery surrounded by 6 buttons. This theme is common in the navigation of our site, and pertains well to all of those locations too. The buttons, from left to right perform the following operations:

• |<- Jump to the first page.
• <<- Jump back two pages.
• <- Jump back one page.
• -> Jump forward one page.
• ->> Jump forward two pages.
• ->| Jump to the last page.

Directly under that is the number of pages, where each page contains the number of images specified next to Number per page:. This value is configurable by the user, but defaults to 2. Thus, if the page count is 87, as it is as of this writing, there are approximately 87*2 user visible images, using the current filters. Under this qualifier is yet another list of numbers, the number in [ ], indicating the currently selected page.

Now for the somewhat more hairy part of the interface. There are a total of 4 combo-boxes and one text-field. The combo-boxes serve to qualify the type of image to show. These qualifiers are those qualifiers specified whenever the image was inserted / edited by our users (or modified by our Admins). Category specifies the general nature / location where the image was taken. Year specifies the model / year of the vehicle being pictured. Model displays the models available during the selected Years. And, lastly, Username contains the full list of usernames in our user roster. To make use of the search filters, you would normally click one or more items from each combo-box. For example, if I wanted to see all pictures inserted by me (aka Remorse), I would merely find my username in the associated combo-box, selecting it and pressing the Apply Filter button. As an example of a more complicated query, say I wanted to see all posts by me that contain a C6. You would first click C6. This automatically selects all C6 model years. You would then select Remorse, as discussed above. And, finally, press Apply Filter to narrow the search by applying the selections you have chosen. Any number of these can be chained together to further narrow the search. It should be noted that multiple items within a combo-box can be selected by pressing the Ctrl-key whilst clicking. The text-field can be used to further narrow the search by locating words within the user-specified image description / caption. Pressing Clear Filter will reset all selections in combo-boxes / text-fields.

This is provided to allow users to insert their own images into the system. Because of legal requirements, not until an administrator looks at the image will it be made available to clients. This is to protect blackcorvettes.com as much as our users. Because of this, you should expect a delay of 1-2 days from the point of submission before the image shows up to outside users. You will be informed by email when this occurs.

To start off this discussion, I will start by discussing each section. If you have never inserted an image before, you will see only an Add Image button. This button will take you to a page to upload images. Otherwise, you will also see a number of your pictures with Edit and Remove buttons above the description / information about the image. These buttons will allow you to either change (Edit) the existing image / image information or delete (Remove) the image from the system. There is a similar page navigation for iterating through your images, selecting the number of images to display per page, etc. as described in the previous section above.

Now onto the Add Image button and its corresponding pane. Once clicked, this will take you to a separate page. The page contains a giant X, with No Image specified. If you had edited your image, as described above, you would instead see a thumbnail of your image. To the right is the path to the image. You could use this to directly access the image from a web-browser. Each uploaded image will be considered the Large image, whereas the others will be automatically scaled by the system to what is considered Small and Medium image sizes. The first user specified value is the upload image. By clicking Browse ..., depending upon the operating system you are using, you will be taken to a file-system view of your machine. From here you can select the JPG, PNG, GIF, or other image file you wish to upload. Next you should specify a Caption. This is essentially a short description to qualify what the image is, where it was taken, or whatever you think concisely identifies it. The Category specifies where the image was taken, what it relates to, or places it into a general category. If the image contains a Corvette image, please select the appropriate Year and Model of the Corvette pictured. It would also be helpful to specify a more verbose description of what the image is, where it was taken, etc. in the Description field.

It should be noted that Administrators can add Categories / Subcategories upon user request. Please direct these requests to support@blackcorvettes.com.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of the possibilities and usage of the user galleries at blackcorvettes.com. Let us at support@blackcorvettes.com know if we can be of further assistance.

The first added feature is the shopping cart. Yes, you can now finally order Black Sheep Squadron gear directly from the site. The actual order is handled by Jim Willis, our founder, with processing handled either by Paypal or Jim (in the case of check / money order). I will not describe very much here as it closely resembles other online vendors making use of Paypal. Other than managing your cart, our site does very little, offloading most of the difficult pieces, like credit card tracking and other such things, to Paypal.

The second feature is the user administered image gallery. Through this you can add pictures of your corvette, images of corvette parts, events that you have attended, etc. through a customized interface. Images uploaded to our server will automatically thumbnail themselves, so no need to handle this task yourself. I have tried to be as descriptive as possible regarding what is entailed in adding an image in the actual web pages themselves, but I will give a short summary here. To add an image, you will click on My Account: Gallery Management. From here, you will click on the Add Image button, which will open up the editing pane. I have called this the editing pane because, should you need to change a description or an image in the future, the same pane will also be displayed when editing. The first text field to be filled out is the Upload field. I suggest pushing the Browse button to find the image you wish to upload. The Caption field will be the caption that is displayed below the image. It should be a relatively short description of what is pictured. The Category and Subcategory drop box allow you to organize your images into particular categories. In the future, when we have the ability to do upgrade reviews and the like, this will be particular special as the Description field described below can link to the particular article the image is associated with. The Vette Information field is optional. It is basically there so that, in the case a corvette is pictured, you can pinpoint its year / model. This information is especially useful as it will aid you when doing searches. See the comments on BlackCorvettes.com: Image Galleries below.

NOTE: Because of legal implications, any image addition (or edit of the image itself), will result in the image being hidden from other users until administrators can review the image. While in general this will likely not be a problem, every precaution must be taken to insure that no illegal images be posted nor that anything that we deem as vulgar be made publicly available.

The third feature is the member image galleries. These are exactly what each user maintains themselves, except that this is the means by which other members can see each others posted images. By clicking on BlackCorvettes.com: Image Galleries a new main page will appear with a somewhat complicated filtering user-interface. I will not explain this in too great of detail, but I will give you an overview and an example of how it can be used. Each drop box can have multiple selections made within it. This can be done by Ctrl-clicking each value you are interested in (Ctrl-clicking means press the Ctrl key then click the item with the left mouse button). Similarly, you can unselect an item that was previously selected using the same technique. Each selection in the same drop box infers that the result must be a member of one of them. If multiple drop boxes contain selections, the result set is defined to be those that contain at least one of the selected items from each drop box. Now with that out of the way, let us go on to our example. Suppose that you wanted to see all images of C5-R's in the gallery. To do this, you would click C5-R subcategory in the Corvette Racing category, then clicking the Apply Filter button. Similarly, imagine that you wanted a more complicated search. Let us say, you wanted a picture of all C5 coupes posted by me (Remorse). You would first click the category C5. Aside from selecting all model years for the C5, this would change your Year drop down to include all models available in the C5's life-span (Note: selecting multiple generations will list all options from all selected generations). Now select Coupe from the Model drop-down. Finally, select Remorse from the Username category, followed up by a click of the Apply Filter button. Obviously, the filtering options are nearly endless.

Selecting no filters results in returning all images.

The forth user-suggested feature is the addition of Occupation and Interests / Hobbies to the membership information. With these, users can provide information about themselves that other may find interesting. You can edit these and allow others to see the information you provided through My Account: Update Information. It should be stressed that merely adding them is not sufficient, you must also explicitly allow others to see them.

The fifth feature is the addition of filtering capabilities to BlackCorvettes.com: Membership Roster. Each word typed in will be searched for a substring match in all user-visible information. I stress user-visible because if the user has opted not to give out their real name (i.e. by unchecking the Your Name checkbox in My Account: Update Information) or other information, that information will not be used in the search. By pressing the Apply Filter button only the subset of users matching your request will be listed.

The sixth user-suggested feature is the addition of an image link in the BlackCorvettes.com: Membership Roster for each member. What this basically is is a shortcut means of auto-selecting Username equal to the particular user you select in the BlackCorvettes.com: Image Galleries.

The seventh feature is merely an improvement in the user-interface. The banner and background now load together. Anywhere where there are arrow buttons, I have also included page indexes (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >). I should also point out something that really has not changed all that much but was previously misunderstood. In the BlackCorvettes.com: Membership Roster each button (Username, Coutry, State, City) are clickable. Each allows you to sort all users by that particular value. Pressing the same button twice sorts them in reverse order. Thus, clicking Country twice should probably list United States first, with my username Remorse as item number 1. The reason for this is that I was the first person (in fact UID 1) to sign up in the United States.

Under your My Account menu, a new pop-up has been added to allow you to make site feature suggestions. As the site matures, we hope to incorporate most of the features requested by users into the site.

Note: Each suggestion contains a non-editable Feedback field. This field will be used by site-administrators to communicate with the user making the suggestion. Because a given suggestion may require a conversation, it may be prudent for users to check their suggestions from time to time.

The BSS Roster contains a listing of all registered BSS members. The information provided, by default, only includes the user's username and their locality (i.e. country, state / province / division, city). For more information the user must allow release of this information via their Update Information link. Currently, users may choose to release their full name, street address, email address, phone number, gender, birth date, and provided corvette information to other BSS members.

For an example of someone who has already released more information, click the [+] to the left of my username (Remorse).

Note: The BSS Roster is only available to members. Thus, information you are providing is only available to those who have been screened by our site-administrators for membership. As indicated, the default behavior is to leave no definitive association between your personal information and your username.

The event calendar allows content editors on blackcorvettes.com to add new events pertinent to the group. For members, in addition to displaying a clickable calendar, an event filtering mechanism is provided to limit the events shown below the calendar. By default, only events occurring today or in the future will be displayed. However, you may also opt to display all events on record, past events, or even events associated with the particular values inidicated in the calendar. Beyond temproral limits, events can be further filtered down to display only those events occurring in your state, region, or division (the regions / divisions used are those defined by the US government for census purposes - click here for a map).

Note: For all non-US residents, your state / region / division is lumped into one big grouping known as 'Outside U.S.'. Should it be useful to provide further division, for every country of the world (a somewhat complicated task), please add a suggestion, as described above, and this feature will be considered for addition during a future update.

I would further like to ask volunteers to step forward. Currently, there are two types of positions available. The most needed is what is known in our site's code as a 'Content Editor'. Content Editors are given special abilities to both generate and edit content on blackcorvettes.com. Currently, this means writing messages (like this one) that provide information and news to BSS members, but also includes the ability to manage BSS events, and help to coordinate user suggestions. In the future, this will also include abilities to manage graphical and multimedia content. The second type of position available is what is known as a 'User Editor'. User Editors are given a considerable amount of power as they have access to all BSS membership information. This allows them to control the classification of users, edit / enable / disable accounts, and otherwise manipulate any and all information associated with member accounts. As such, this position will require digitally signing a non-disclosure agreement, provided by us, in addition to providing a valid phone number before the position will be granted. Please contact admin@blackcorvettes.com if you are interested in either position.