Nervous about vb site launch

[rd3500]

Hi guys,

I am launching a vb subscription forum on Monday. I have about 30 people that reserved a spot to get in. They will be all paid members.

I am using vb as an online class, one of the reasons why the numbers are small and that's the way it should be.

This is my first experience with vb and I am configuring everything myself. I am hoping I am doing things right. I am writing down some of my settings, if you have suggestions I would appreciate them. I don't want to make some stupid mistake, after marketing for now 3 months, Monday is the day.

I have two classes I need to do, one starting monday with 30 people and another one that I will start 2 weeks from now with about 50 people in it. The second class will follow the first one, going through the same content, just 2 weeks later.

The payment is every two weeks, people on monday will pay for the first module of the class and that module will last two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, they will have the option to buy another two weeks for the second module and so on until up to 8 modules.

What I did now is creating a new user group called M1 for module one. I think I set the permissions right, in a way that any other group can only see the category forums but nothing inside them.

To get to the M1 group, people need to register AND then pay for the subscription. Payment is through paypal.

At the moment I don't have email confirmation set up, I am afraid the board emails will go to the spam folder and create problems for the members. The web site is not public, only people that reserved their spot will be given the URL for now and when I am done, I will close the registrations.

I was also thinking about using my gmail account for smtp instead of the server. I noticed email going out from google are less subject to be considered spam.

In two weeks, I need to set up a second subscription payment for the second module. My understanding is that at that time I will set up a second group, let's say M2 for the second module. That group will have access to all the forums of the M1 group plus the new ones.

The subscription for the M2 module will be available only to people of the M1 group, so they can move up and only people that already have paid for M1 can get to M2. At least I think I can do that.

Private messaging right now is off I don't know why but I am not sure I want it enabled for now.

I also have the blog module, I would like the blogs to be available only to the members for now, I am not sure where to find that. In the future, I might have selected blogs public.

I have problem ordering the sticky in the forums, I saw a plug in but my understanding is that it is not supported anymore. I would be happy in having the sticky ordered alphabetically. The lessons in each module are sticky and it would be nice to have them in order instead of me going crazy trying to post messages to them in the right order and then close them.

I am sorry about the long post, I guess it was to put what I have done into writing. I am a little bit nervous, I have done the marketing with a blog and I don't know vb at all.

Anything I am missing or I could do better?