Improvements to Membership Service Workflows

A major restructuring is nearly complete for the member renewal workflow. This splits out any profile updates (name, address, etc) from the renewal workflow for existing RUSA members. These updates will solely be handled by the profile update workflow going forward. Several back office processing updates are bundled with this, and there are several improvements to how concurrent membership requests are handled (particularly for households). This is mostly tested and should roll out soon, and is tracked in bug 1126. Some minor follow-up changes are tracked in bugs 1235 and 1236.

We have plans in place to change the password reset function to operate on RUSA # rather than email address and username. When a website account does not yet exist, the confirmation message will now be able to say that explicitly. This should considerably reduce confusion for members who have not yet created their website account, which is one of the most frequence sources of overhead with website accounts. This is tracked in bug 1233.

There are a few minor back office enhancements to membership change requests. The address approval form now shows the application type. Existing members in the address approval form now have a hyperlink.

Website Content and Organization

Emily O'Brien has volunteered to join the taskforce for revamping the RUSA site's content and organization. The next meeting is being coordinated for March.

Paul demonstrated how to create a Drupal content type for Brevet and Rouleur Weeks to more cleanly and consistently maintain the list on the home page. This also gave us useful information on how to manage images in Drupal where a page or pages have a number of the same sized images. (Each year’s Board candidate page is a good example.)

Website Indexing and Search Display

Ted Fay suggested two improvements for changing how public search engines index the RUSA site and display RUSA pages in search results. These are tracked as such:

• Bug 1230 - Block non-prod sites from search engine indexing. This involves updating robots.txt on all server instances. This has been done in dev, but more recent Drupal versions make this less straightforward. This will likely be completed in the coming month.
• Bug 1231 - DNS verification for Google Search Console. This will allow us to tune how RUSA search results appear in Google. Paul described how to update DNS entries in order to support this. This will likely be completed in the coming month.

Perms Search

Jeff enhanced the Permanent Route Search function to split the distance option [200 - 399 km] to be separate [200 - 299 km] and [300 - 399 km] options. This better aligns with standard event distances.

Providing Feedback on Permanent Routes

Bug 1216 requested the ability for members to provide ratings on permanent routes for various dimensions (safety, difficulty, etc). This is a rather costly feature to implement, however RideWithGPS comments could serve this purpose assuming some process changes from the Permanents Committee. Jeff documented a means of maintaining RWGPS routes for permanents that retains this history, for consideration by the Permanents Committee.

Respectfully submitted,

- Lois, Charlie, Man-Fai, Paul, JLE, and Jeff