If you are missing an achievement, please let me know. Currently, achievements are:

• Hole in One
• Broke 100
• Broke 90
• Broke 80
• Broke Par
• Eagle
• Albatross
• Shot Your Age
• Hole in One
• Newport Cup Participant
• TST Outing Participant (or Organizer)
• Tournament Winner
• Lowest Score Wins (technically an "Award")
• Stupid Monkey (ditto)
• Various Challenges

A full list of achievements is always available at http://thesandtrap.com/awards/ . I'll update this list when we ever add achievements.

Note: you don't get all the "Broke" achievements if you broke par. Just pick the best one you've achieved. Then try to earn the next best one!

For the Tournament Winner achievement, you determine the level of tournament that you believe qualifies. If you want the achievement, please give me some details so I can note it in the accomplishment: the name of the tournament, the dates (or year, or month), etc. If you've won multiple tournaments, pick one.

Awards and Achievements are listed at the bottom, near your signature, and "Challenges" are in the sidebar under your avatar/username/etc.

I wasn't sure if this belonged here or in the tech support forum;  I figured here might be better because I don't know if the answer might expose something that isn't meant to be seen by everyone (so spammers can't circumvent it, that sort of thing).

Some of my comment replies aren't showing up.  My last two (yesterday + day before) on the 5 minutes thread aren't visible in that conversation, but they appear in my profile.  

On the other hand, if I did something wrong in those posts, please let me know so I don't do that again.

sixiron

Your inbox is full. You must delete some messages before you can send any more.

I can't figure out how to delete messages from my inbox, can you tell me how to do that?

Thanks

iPhone notifications, web app and more - Invision Community - Invision Community

---

The longest awaited iPhone feature is almost here, native iOS notifications, and we couldn't wait to ensure it is enabled for your Invision Community. Invision Community 4.7.9 is iPhone push notification ready...

Add The Sand Trap to your home screen, too, as a stand-alone "app" and you can get notifications on your phone. If you view on a desktop/laptop browser, you can also click the notification bell at the top and you may be prompted to get notifications your desktop, too, if you haven't already.

I'll be the first to admit that this isn't the best solution, as the "standalone" app takes you to /forums/ (I can configure that, but only to pages that exist to the general public - I can't even link to /discover/unread/). But, it's something, and just having the site on your phone should notify you.

It grinds people's gears when you respond, minutes apart, to multiple users with multiple posts. This forum has the ability to let you respond to multiple posts inside of one post. It's called multi-quote, and it's useful, and virtually required.

Quote

Replying with a multi-quotation allows you to respond in line to another poster and include context to your replies or to reply to multiple posters within the same reply.

1. Navigate to the posts you would like to respond to.
2. At the bottom of each post, on the left, you will see the "+ Multi" button. Click it (it should change to a check mark) on every post you want to quote.
3. When you are satisfied with your selections, click the "Quote n posts" button floating in the bottom right corner of your browser window to quote the posts.
4. You'll be taken to the text editor with the posts you selected quoted.

2. Embed Videos

This forum will embed YouTube and Vimeo videos, and we strongly encourage you to embed videos of these types. Just paste the video URL on its own line, press return, and the video will be embedded. Here's a page with more detail and a video on how to embed videos: http://thesandtrap.com/how-to/embed-videos .

3. Search

Please search for an existing topic before starting a new one. Even if a thread is years old, we'd rather you bump the old thread with a new post than to start a new, virtually identical thread. This forum has been around for almost a decade - there are a lot of topics.

4. Set an Avatar

You're sent a PM about this when you sign up. If you don't set one, one will be set for you when you hit between 10-25 posts, typically.

5. Add your Name

More here: http://thesandtrap.com/forums/topic/70980-share-your-name-folks/ .

As a general rule, we do not ban many people at all here at TST (spammers excluded). In fact, weeks will go by between bans, which on a site as busy as this one, is virtually unheard of.

When we moved to IPS 4 on October 1, 2015, we lost the ability to "expire" user groups after a certain amount of time. This means that if we added someone to the Penalty Box, we had to remember to remove them. And, let's be honest, the Penalty Box wasn't as transparent as we'd like, either. Though many members were aware of why a member might be in the Penalty Box, they weren't aware of the specifics, and other members would often be completely unaware.

So, "Penalty Box" is going the way of the dodo.

Though the expiring user groups is going away, IPS 4 brings with it a fairly straightforward warning system. Through it, we (mods/admins) can issue warnings to people. They have to acknowledge the warning before they can continue to post, and the warning is tagged with a title, points, expiration dates for those points, and a notice for both the user and for us to see.

Just as with points on a driver's license or something like that, as users rack up points, their privileges decline. To the right you can see our current schedule. A user who racks up 10 points will have his content moderated for three days, or one day after he's allowed to post again (he's restricted from posting for two days).

A user who somehow reaches 40 points will have his content restricted for 24 days and his will not be able to post for 16. After that, if a user has 50 active points, they're permanently banned.

Additionally, other penalties may be applied as well, including the loss of PM privileges, the loss of the ability to post status updates, and other features on the site that exist either now or in the future.

As points expire, it doesn't change the penalties already incurred. For example, if Random User is warned with three points that expire in 10 days, and that takes him to 11 active points, he'll be moderated for three days and restricted from posting for two, but the points will fall off after those 10 days and he'll fall back down to 8 (if the 8 have not also expired). This simply means that another two-point warning or greater will result in the same or greater restriction being applied, again.

Though moderators and admins can customize the number of points, the expiration date of those points, and even whether to over-ride the existing restriction/moderation settings or their duration, our base level warnings right now are:

- Spamming, 999 points, never expires.*
- Spamming (Light), 5 points, 180 days
- Inappropriate Language, 3 points, 36 days.
- Rude/Obnoxious Behavior, 5 points, 72 days.
- Trolling, 5 point, 72 days.

* Note that this triggers the 50 point permanent ban.

So, in essence:

• The Penalty Box functionality is replaced with the warning system.
• The warning system is a much more efficient, public way to handle this type of stuff.
• At the end of the day, we use this type of stuff to limit or restrict posters way, way less than virtually all other forums. Golfer are, generally speaking, good people.

Rookie of the Year

These members joined the site between December 2021 or at any point in 2022 and amassed the most reputation points while remaining in good standing throughout the year (only points earned in 2022 count). Just as you'd expect, of course! These members have a bright future ahead of themselves!

Note: winning Rookie of the Year does not preclude you from also winning Member of the Year awards. It'd be like a rookie in a major sport also winning the MVP - it can happen. It just didn't happen this year… 😄

ROTY #3: TST's Bronze Rookie of the Year is…

With 19 reputation points in 29 posts (a 0.655 ratio), and after joining on July 5, 2022… @Opoponax!

ROTY #2: TST's Silver Rookie of the Year is…

Joining on July 28, 2022 and earning 20 reputation points in 106 posts (0.189), the Manuel de la Torre fan, let's congratulate @Wade Patton!!

ROTY #1: TST's Gold Rookie of the Year is…

Racking up 39 reputation votes in total, this member joined the site on March 19, 2022 and racked up a winning total in 164 posts (0.238 points per post)! Let's congratulate @DoubleAce on his Rookie of the Year award!!

Congratulations!

Now, it's on to the big one. The one we've all been waiting for. The…

Member of the Year

These members are the best of the best. They amassed the most reputation points during the calendar year 2022, and remained in good standing throughout the year. Their peers - you guys and gals - felt their posts were worthy of the most thanks, skins, fist bumps, high fives, or reputation, whatever you want to call it. These are the elite. The people who make insightful posts that help further the discussion… even if you disagree with them occasionally. Or frequently.

Reminder: staff (me, @nevets88, @billchao, @boogielicious, @phillyk, @DaveP043, and @woodzie264 — in no particular order) are ineligible for all yearly awards, or we would have taken home some hardware here. But, moderating you fine folks is prize enough, and we thank you for your contributions to our community here! Without further ado…

MOTY #3: TST's Bronze Member of the Year is…

This member has one of the fastest swing speeds on the forum. He joined on March 29, 2010 and has made 20,500 posts since then. In 2022, he racked up 286 reputation points. For 2022, the bronze Member of the Year is…  @saevel25!

MOTY #2: TST's Silver Member of the Year is…

When this member isn't busy dealing with the health crisis, or his his own SHANK-HOSEL-19 infection, he's amassing 399 reputation points in 2022! With a current content count of 8,677 posts since joining on March 24, 2014… and as the sole lefty on this group, unseated at the top after three years in gold, the second-place Member of the Year is… @Vinsk!

MOTY #1: TST's Gold Member of the Year is…

After joining on August 21, 2018, and making 4,112 posts, roughly half of which include the phrases "white belt," "ice cream", or "Chicago," this member works hard on his swing when he works on it, and the rest of the time dreams of the days since he was educated by a greasy nun in a Brazilian cathouse (or something like that). Having long surpassed his "rule of 35" in both of the ways, he amassed 595 points in 2022. Our Member of the Year for 2022 is… @ChetlovesMer!

P.S. You can always check on the Leaderboard here: https://thesandtrap.com/leaderboard/.

Step 1, go here: https://thesandtrap.com/communitymap/markers/. Step 2: Click the forum icon, which will prompt you whether you want to mark them as read. Go ahead!

With it comes a number of nice features.

Kickstarter of the Year

We sometimes don't give out these awards, because often the major championship topics rank at the top (as happened again this year) and because sometimes long-running topics like "5 Minutes Daily" or "What'd You Shoot Today?" are at the top. And sometimes they're just an easy win, like the "Tiger Catch-All Topic."

But this past year we continued to deal with a pandemic, and are still dealing with it, and we also saw some interesting developments from within the golf world. So, without further ado, our Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalists in the Kickstarter of the Year, the people who started some of the busiest topics of the year, are:

KOTY #3: TST's Bronze Kickstarter of the Year is…

@cipher for organizing an awesome trip and an awesome summer break and a reason to live:

KOTY #2: TST's Silver Kickstarter of the Year is…

@ncates00 took the bait in the Bryson-Brooks feud, but sometimes the bait is baited with a silver hook!

KOTY #1: TST's Gold Kickstarter of the Year is…

@PSherrard01 asked a valid question:

Rookie of the Year

These members joined the site between December 2020 or at any point in 2021 and amassed the most reputation points while remaining in good standing throughout the year (only points earned in 2021 count). Just as you'd expect, of course! These members have a bright future ahead of themselves!

Note: winning Rookie of the Year does not preclude you from also winning Member of the Year awards. It'd be like a rookie in a major sport also winning the MVP - it can happen. It just didn't happen this year… 😄

ROTY #3: TST's Bronze Rookie of the Year is…

With 29 reputation points in 69 posts (a 0.420 ratio), and after joining on August 5, 2021… @Ruler!

ROTY #2: TST's Silver Rookie of the Year is…

Joining on December 9, 2020 and earning 31 reputation points in only 86 posts (0.360), a man of few words and posts, let's congratulate @Troy Ocker!!

ROTY #1: TST's Gold Rookie of the Year is…

Racking up 37 reputation votes in total, this member didn't join the site until July 26, 2021 and racked up a winning total in only 155 posts (0.239 points per post)! Let's congratulate @HankBlue on his Rookie of the Year award!!

Congratulations!

Now, it's on to the big one. The one we've all been waiting for. The…

Member of the Year

These members are the best of the best. They amassed the most reputation points during the calendar year 2021, and remained in good standing throughout the year. Their peers - you guys and gals - felt their posts were worthy of the most thanks, skins, fist bumps, high fives, or reputation, whatever you want to call it. These are the elite. The people who make insightful posts that help further the discussion… even if you disagree with them occasionally. Or frequently.

Reminder: staff (me, @nevets88, @billchao, @boogielicious, @phillyk, @DaveP043, @woodzie264, @georgep, and @TN94z — in no particular order) are ineligible for all yearly awards, or we would have taken home some hardware here. But, moderating you fine folks is prize enough, and we thank you for your contributions to our community here! Without further ado…

MOTY #3: TST's Bronze Member of the Year is…

This member plays golf, but you may just think he's the class clown or court jester. He joined on January 1, 2017 and has made 4,333 posts since then. In 2021, he amassed 361 reputation points. For 2021, the bronze Member of the Year is…  @Double Mocha Man!

MOTY #2: TST's Silver Member of the Year is…

After joining on August 21, 2018, and making 3,011 posts, roughly one third of which include the phrases "white belt" or "ice cream", this member works hard on his swing when he works on it, and the rest of the time dreams of the days since he was educated by a greasy nun in a Brazilian cathouse (or something like that). Having long surpassed his "rule of 35" in both of the ways, he amassed 458 points in 2021. Our silver Member of the Year for 2020 is… @ChetlovesMer!

MOTY #1: TST's Gold Member of the Year is…

When this member isn't busy dealing with the health crisis, or his his own SHANK-HOSEL-19 infection, he's amassing 605 reputation points in 2021! With a current content count of 8,111 posts since joining on March 24, 2014… He's the… uhhhhh… Jon Rahm of TST for 2021, the cream of the crop once again, and a three-time-repeat gold medal MOTY winner… @Vinsk!

One of those was the introduction of "clubs." Clubs are basically sub-sections of the site that groups of people can form and control. A regular member can create a club, invite people to join, and post their own images in their own galleries, have their own topics and discussions, etc. Creators of clubs can assign leadership roles, can limit the club to privately invited members or make them public, and many other things. They're uniquely customizable and controllable, by regular members.

Clubs can be created for regional groups of people who want to organize outings (even those like the Newport Cup). Clubs can be organized for some off-topic things like my Apple Fans club to discuss the iPhone, Mac, etc. Clubs can be organized for fans of particular equipment makers. You could start a club for your fantasy football league. The possibilities are endless, and I would ask only that you carefully consider the type of club you want to create. Make it too narrow and it's not going to be very popular (which in some cases could be okay), and make it too broad and you may as well just start a forum topic on the things.

But again, YOU can control the club. In fact, when you first create a club, you're essentially the owner/leader/moderator of that club. Right off the bat you can choose the privacy mode of your club:

• Public - Everyone can see the club and its posts, and can participate without joining.
• Open - Everyone can see the club its posts, but only members can participate. Everyone can join.
• Closed -  Everyone can see the club and who's in it, but only members can see posts and participate. Users need to ask a leader to join.
• Private - Only members can find the club and see its posts. Users need to be invited by a leader to join.

As a group's leader, you can also choose whether your group has even has Topics or just a gallery, or a mix of both. You can create different "topic areas" too, by creating different "discussion groups." For example, should the "Apple Fans" group grow large enough, we could create discussion topics around just the iPhone or just around iOS, with a separate one for Macs/macOS.

Check them out. If you're in doubt about what kind of club you'd like to create and lead, PM me or PM a few of your potential members/fellow leaders.

You can find the clubs, always, right here:

https://thesandtrap.com/clubs/

Their content will show up right along-side forum posts and topics in the "activity streams" many of you have bookmarked as your home page(s), like https://thesandtrap.com/discover/6/.

I've alerted the developer of the plugin/application and he is (hopefully) working toward a fix. Awards continue to be visible on your profile (for example, https://thesandtrap.com/profile/1-iacas/?tab=node_awards_Awards) and at /awards/ as linked above.

Thanks,

Jeff

Not sure if this warrants a topic or not, mods/admin delete if this is useless. 

At the top of my profile, you'll notice this:

That contains two of the three things I'll talk about here.

• Reputation - This has been around for a loooong time. You can earn "reputation points" when people click on the "Upvote" or "Thumbs Up" or "Funny" or "Informative" buttons in the bottom right of most posts. They look like this:
  
  My reputation is about 11,000, and you earn points when others "give" them to you by "reacting" to your posts. Note that the "confused" and "booooo" reactions award no reputation points (nor do they subtract any). These aren't new, and they're pretty much unchanged.
• Awards  - These are actually handled by a third-party plugin, and they include both the "challenge badges" (like the No Sixes Challenge) as well as other awards, like "Breaking 80" and "Eagle" and "Lowest Score Wins owner." You can see my awards at  https://thesandtrap.com/profile/1-iacas/?tab=node_awards_Awards.
• Achievements - You can read more about these here. These are what's new in version 4.6, and what I'll spend the rest of this post talking about.

Achievements

The staff of moderators and I have spent a lot of time over the past few days contemplating how many points to award for various activities. These points count separately.

We currently have nine levels of "achievement," or "ranks" as they're called. They are currently (subject to slight changes at any time):

1. Newbie - 0 points.
2. Member - 25 points.
3. Established Member - 100 points.
4. Well Established Member - 250 points.
5. Dedicated Member - 500 points.
6. Great Member - 1,000 points.
7. Super Member - 5,000 points.
8. Incredible Member - 10,000 points.
9. Hall of Fame Member - 100,000 points.

Your rank is indicated by a little flag (currently) over the bottom-left corner of your avatar. The flags look like this:

I'm sure you can see the pattern. 🙂

You can earn points by doing a number of things. For example:

• Posting a comment (a reply to an existing topic).
• Posting a new topic.
• Creating a poll. Voting on a poll. In fact, currently, points are awarded to the poll voter and the poll creator every time someone votes in a poll.
• Adding a reaction to someone. Receiving a reaction to someone.
• Etc.

In other words, you can earn "points" by using the forum and posting content. Or at least voting with "likes" and voting up content (like my buddy Paul who has reached "Great Member" rank despite never having posted a single thing on TST).

We don't plan to share the number of points available for some of these things, but I will say we also have milestone points awards, too. If you earn (to make this up) 1 point for every topic you create, you might earn a billion points for the 72nd topic you create. Or the 72nd reaction you give (or receive). Or the 36th poll you create. Etc. On top of the points you earn for just creating the poll, post, topic, etc.

You can see my badges here: https://thesandtrap.com/profile/1-iacas/badges/. Add "/badges/" to the end of your profile URL and you can see your badges, too. Hover over them and you'll see what each is for.

So, that's the new "Achievements" functionality on TST. Take a look at your own badges and achievements.

P.S. "Rare" badges are those given to fewer than 5% of the membership.

It doesn't happen every time I try to view new content, but it's happening most of the time.

Kickstarter of the Year

We sometimes don't give out these awards, because often the major championship topics rank at the top (that happened this year too), sometimes long-running topics like "5 Minutes Daily" or "What'd You Shoot Today" are at the top. And sometimes they're just an easy win, like the "Tiger Catch-All Topic."

But this past year we dealt with a pandemic, and are still dealing with it, and we also saw some interesting developments from within the golf world. So, without further ado, our Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalists in the Kickstarter of the Year, the people who started some of the busiest topics of the year, are:

KOTY #3: TST's Bronze Kickstarter of the Year is…

@Piz for asking what we were all doing now given the quarantine earlier in the year.

KOTY #2: TST's Silver Kickstarter of the Year is…

@ShawnSum wondered just what in the heck Bryson was doing, and a lot of other people wanted to talk about him as well!

KOTY #1: TST's Gold Kickstarter of the Year is…

@dennyjones asked whether COVID-19 was affecting your golf.

Rookie of the Year

These members joined the site within the last month of 2019 or any time in 2020 and amassed the most reputation points while remaining in good standing throughout the year (only points earned in 2020 count). Just as you'd expect, of course! These members have a bright future ahead of themselves!

Note: winning Rookie of the Year does not preclude you from also winning Member of the Year awards. It'd be like a rookie in a major sport also winning the MVP - it can happen. It just didn't happen this year… 😄

ROTY #3: TST's Bronze Rookie of the Year is…

With 32 reputation points in 175 posts (a 0.183 ratio), and after joining on Christmas Day, 2019, @Sandy Lie!

ROTY #2: TST's Silver Rookie of the Year is…

Joining on June 22, 2020 and earning 37 reputation points in 100 posts (0.370), we haven't seen him in awhile but hope he will return, let's congratulate @ShaftFarmer!!

ROTY #1: TST's Gold Rookie of the Year is…

Racking up 56 reputation votes in total, this member joined May 15, 2020 and racked up a winning total in only 276 posts (0.203)! Let's congratulate @StuM on his Rookie of the Year award!!

Congratulations!

Now, it's on to the big one. The one we've all been waiting for. The…

Member of the Year

These members are the best of the best. They amassed the most reputation points during the calendar year 2020, and remained in good standing throughout the year. Their peers - you guys and gals - felt their posts were worthy of the most thanks, skins, fist bumps, high fives, or reputation, whatever you want to call it. These are the elite. The people who make insightful posts that help further the discussion… even if you disagree with them occasionally. Or frequently.

Reminder: staff (me, @nevets88, @billchao, @boogielicious, @phillyk, @DaveP043, @woodzie264, @georgep, and @TN94z — in no particular order) are ineligible for yearly awards, or we would have taken home some hardware here. But, moderating you fine folks is prize enough, and we thank you for your contributions to our community here! Without further ado…

MOTY #3: TST's Bronze Member of the Year is…

After joining on August 21, 2018, and making 1,950 posts, roughly one third of which include the phrases "white belt" or "ice cream [truck|man]", this member works hard on his swing when he works on it, and the rest of the time dreams of the days since he was able to wear a white belt. Having long surpassed his "rule of 35" in both of the ways, he amassed 346 points in 2020. Our bronze Member of the Year for 2020 is… @ChetlovesMer!

MOTY #2: TST's Silver Member of the Year is…

This member made a new year's resolution a few years ago and has stuck to it ever since, unlike literally everyone else in the world. His new year's resolution was to post witty rejoinders and join us in making merriment. He joined on January 1, 2017 and has made 2,958 posts since then. In 2020, he amassed 414 reputation points. For 2020, the silver Member of the Year is… @Double Mocha Man!

MOTY #1: TST's Gold Member of the Year is…

When this member isn't busy dealing with the health crisis, injuring himself on skateboards or bicycles or something, or dealing with the health crisis in his own game known as Accute Hosilitis, he's amassing 502 reputation points in 2020! With a current content count of 6,809 posts since joining on March 24, 2014… He's the… uhhhhh… Dustin Johnson (?) of TST for 2020, the cream of the crop once again, and a repeat gold medal MOTY winner… @Vinsk!

More importantly, it's running Invision Power Community software version 4.5.4, a BIG upgrade from 4.4.10.

Over the next few days I'll be making some tweaks to a few things.

• Some of the pagination could be better colors.
• The post numbering starts over at 1 on every page, but I've written to the developer.
• I removed a lot of old cruft from the custom CSS file. The site is a bit cleaner, though a bit more "spaced out" in some places, too.

If you have any questions, notice something goofy, or anything… post it here!