How do you become a member and access all the extra things? Stupid question yes, but I can't find no links etc.

You'll need to wait for Chris to upgrade your account. Chris usually gets it done quite quickly . If you pm him aswell so he knows to look out for your donation

Cheers Micky! Not very clued up today!

nnooooo micky your giving away all the secrets of the 'other side' haha, there are loads of top tips and info its brill well worth any money given in donation.

Thank you for your donations Stephlar and Jason. I'll make sure you get access to the members section very soon.

I've gave you both access to the members forums.

Over the coming time the whole members area is going to be updated and worked on to make sure that members have the best information possible.

This sounds really promising guys, thx for putting the effort in

So after the lockdown will ppl who are already a member but haven't donated be able to see everything again? (except the members section of course) or do they have to donate to gain access again?

i can understand a lockdown period to keep traffic to a minimum while changes are being made but i dont agree if existing members lose all access just cause they haven't donated, even if the lockdown period ends

i'm not against donating, or even making new members donate, but cutting off access of people who are already here (apart from a temp month) is not right imo

I'm curious how much bandwidth you go through.

I only use OT so I'll sit it out for a month.

I would think it's better to work out where the bandwidth is coming from and deal with that. It can't be just the forum. I've got 7000 members on mine and only do 25Gb a month. The whole lot only costs me 50 quid a year.

If you have a lot of people leeching the image library it's better to block that and keep your own site accessible. Or find a better server deal with more bandwidth.

lifetime donation ?

A simple permission change to stop guests reading the key forums would help some of that. Let them see it but not read it. That gives them enough info to decide if they want to join. It reduces your bandwidth use to one page instead of dozens of threads.

over on STOC if you haven't paid you only see the Topic Headers and nothing more, you can't access them.
I'm happy to donate whenever a request is made if required anytime.

On STOC I can see/post on all of the threads except for the technical one's, and I wouldn't use them anyway...