When you create an forum and keep it closed to fix with settings and forums and all that and not open it for the public until an later date do you reset your account join date or do you keep it before the opening of your forum?
Great thread! I've done both. Usually if I like my join date (OCD), I will keep it. As you can see, mine here is December '07. That's surely not accurate anymore if you consider when we "officially" launched.
Good question John and one I haven't particularly considered before. I usually just keep mine as it was on the installation date, I don't feel it's of grave importance and helps you keep track, years later, of when you began work on your forum.
This is what I like about keeping it. I always use my join date as the day I started the forum. There may or may not be a date for the day I "opened" the forum.
I've never modified (or even thought about modifying) my join date... don't really see the need to. :p
I never thought about the join date (except when phpbb sets it back about 40 years for some reason). I don't think most people really worry about it.
My people worry about everything like that. They wanted to know why user 1 was admin and I was user #2. They all wanted to be in the top 10, then top 100. That was at first, those things have not been talked about as of late. I re-installed a few times before opening to be sure every step was documented and everything played well together so my join date was a few days before the opening day.
I don't see any reason to change my join date, I think its useful for tracking how long the site has been active. Plus I waited a bit for the purpose of launching one forum on September 11th. Never forget.
vBulletin allows you to edit the join date through the Admin CP when viewing a user profile. I drew up my IPB, I don't see anything in the Admin CP for Invision. I would assume you may have to edit the database directly.
K, I asked a friend, wow I feel dumb. It's measured in UNIX time. I just did a conversion and it's that indeed.
I've never done this actually, I usually make the boards available for my BETA testers who are usually my staff team or trusted users.
I've never really felt the need to change my join date and, because of this, I've always left it "as-is". Like Tyler, I like to keep everything original - no changes necessary.
If anyone needs to change their join date but your software doesn't support changing it in the control panel, you could use a timestamp converter to get the Unix timestamp and change it in the database: Online Conversion - Unix time conversion