Random Catastrophe

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Welcome to the new and slightly improved RandomCatastrophe.com! The site has been down for a few days so that I could install and test a few new features. I hope that everyone will take full use of what this site now has to offer. I’ll run down some of the features in this post but the easiest thing to do is test them for yourself.

Registration | User Profile | Photo Album

/Activity Stream | Friends | Links

Groups | Forums | Coming Soon | Bug report | Final Comments

The new features of the website are only available to registered members. Getting an account is fast and free so click here to get started.

If you signed up for an account on March 1 or later, you already have access to all of these great features.

Take note of the disclaimer, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service agreements to stay up on everything.

The site is open to anyone and everyone. If you join the site, feel free to invite others and spread the word about the site so that it can grow. A bigger community is a more interactive community.

The core component of the site is your member profile. You can view mine by clicking here.

The profile is highly detailed and highly customizable. We have a wide variety of fields that you can choose to fill in and more can be added in the future. The only fields that are required are those found on the registration page. Everything else is entirely up to you! The following sections exist for you to fill out to your own needs:

• Basics – filled out on registration
• Hobbies and Interests
• Interactive
• Personal
• Educational/Professional

As you answer each question under each section, you can set the option controlling who is able to view that information. You can elect to have it viewable by any site member, your friends only or only yourself.

As I mentioned, everything is optional and it is left up to each person to decide which fields they fill out and who can see them. It is also worth repeating that we will not give away or sell your information to any outside parties. It is simply a tool for you to improve your site profile and interact with other users.

Also, you can upload your own custom avatar and set your forum signature. If you use the same email address to register for this site as you did/do for Gravatar you can use your gravatar as your site avatar.

You are able to create your own photo album here on the site. Currently, you are limited to 50 photo uploads so as to not chew up our server space. This limit may change in the future depending on membership size or if we upgrade to a larger server.

Think of your activity stream the way you would a facebook status update or posting to twitter. You can post status updates in your activity stream that can be seen across the website. You also have the ability to post those same updates to your twitter account using the tweetstream settings.
You can post from RandomCatastrophe.com to Twitter, Twitter to RandomCatastrophe.com and even decide that on a word by word basis using good and bad filters.
You can also embed videos in to your stream. Simply grab the URL to your video from a site such as youtube and place it in your activity stream update. The embed code will be pulled and people can view your video without leaving this site.

There are many more options on the activity stream such as the ability to comment but you’ll have to dig in to that for yourself.

The ability to sink your RandomCatastrophe.com activities with those on Facebook is coming soon.

Look in the members directory for people you’d like to add as friends. You will then be able to view their profile information that is set to “friends only” and exchange things such as private messages.

If you have a link you’d like to share you can add it to the site and allow others to view and rate it. These could be links to articles, videos, photo albums or personal blog posts. There’s really no limit to what you can showcase.

You have the ability to create or join any group that you so desire. I have created a few groups already but any user has the ability to create their own groups if they desire.

You can create a public group which anyone on the site is able to join and is listed in the Groups Directory. You can also create a private group which is listed in the directory but people have to request to join. The third group option is hidden which means it is not listed in the directory and the only way to join is to be invited.

Each group has an activity stream and each can be set up to get activity from any twitter account you wish to associate with it. Groups can also have their own avatars, forums and chat.

• Forums

Each group has the ability to create a forum which is connected to that group. Great for carrying on longer discussions or holding events. Just have a look at the Forums Directory to see some of what is available.

I’ve not fully tested this feature so if there are bugs, please email them to me. But still, you can chat publicly with anyone, limit your chatting to a specific group’s room and also to a specific member.

Outside of the ability to connect your activities to your facebook account, there are a few features that will come in the future.

The biggest is the ability for a person to create and maintain their own blog/site. Also, there will be a feature that will allow for each group to be connected to a blog which could be posted to by group members.

I don’t want to give up too much as there’s a lot of things that could happen in the future but those are the biggest ones.

I’ve tested most everything but there are always things that don’t seem to crop up until people customize things to their own needs. If you’ve found something you believe to be a bug, simply email it to me with as much specific detail as possible as to what you were doing when the bug was produced. I can’t promise an immediate resolution but i’ll add that to the list.

I only briefly touched on all of the things that you have at your fingertips, I just encourage you to Register and have a look for yourself.

It is my sincere hope that this will allow for this site to develop in to a strong community but that it will also give people the ability to host their own communities within a community centered around their own personal interests.

These features are available to anyone that wants to use them at no cost to you. I will accept donations if you so desire. However, even though these features may be bigger than the site is ready for now, I still wanted to make them available to use.

When I started this website I said it was going to be for fun and not designed to turn a profit. Part of what I enjoy about websites is making and adding to them such as the features you now can access. I have had a lot of fun over the past week or so trying to pull all of this together. So even if nobody uses them, I still entend to keep updating and adding new ones because I enjoy the process.

Still, it is my hope that you do use them and you find it an enjoyable experience. Why not start by being my friend?

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