Updates

This is a announcement update of fanlisting requirements for the General category.

We have recently had questions about whether owners are required to update a member’s country if requested. By this we do not mean listing fictional countries such as ‘Middle Earth’, but owner’s taking into consideration changing world events that may not be reflected in a scripts such as Enthusiast or phpFanbase’s countries list (a good example being Serbia/Montenegro splitting into individual countries).

We have decided that as a name, e-mail and country are the requirements for joining a fanlisting, that allowing members to have their country listed properly is something that will be troubles worthy if an owner refuses to edit the country.

Since we cannot expect owners to always know when a country has changed, we will not immediately place you on troubles. You will be e-mailed by the troubles staffer and made aware of the situation so that you can make the appropriate changes. However, if after this is done you still have not fixed the problem, you will be placed on troubles.

With scripts such as Enthusiast and phpFanbase (and, we assume, any other available scripts) these changes are relatively painless, and we will detail how to do this below. If owners wish to see a full list of countries, they may check out this list or we suggest websites like Flags for more information.

We should point out that we are not getting into a debate about ‘what is a country’ - we do realise that there are districts in countries that people would prefer to be their own nation. We don’t want to cause hassle for owners with grey areas such as this. For our purposes we will be going off sites such as Flags and the current UN countries list.

Editing Enthusiast:
Go into your main Enthusiast folder and find countries.inc.php - this is the file you will need to edit. However, the current Enthusiast build (3.1.2) does have an up-to-date list of countries so you should not need to edit anything if you have this build.

Editing phpFanbase:
Find the file join.php - your countries list is located here. Open and scroll to find the list of countries. Be careful with editing this file as it contains coding, and you don’t want to edit that!

If you have a script that you would like us to list the editing instructions for, please contact the senior staff. If owners have questions about this announcement and what it may mean for them, please feel free to ask :)