• ToyotaVanTech.com Site Features

    Your ToyotaVanTech account has many settings that you can adjust to your own personal tastes and needs. At the upper right, click on "My Profile" and "Settings" to customize the various options.

    ToyotaVanTech.com's interactive Forum is the most active section of the site, but ToyotaVanTech.com has some other great features in addition to the Forum.

    The ToyotaVanTech.com Technical Library is an ongoing collaborative process. To access the articles, just look to your left for the sidebar containing the library index (or, if you're in the Forum, click on "Library" in your upper left navigation bar). From the Library Home Page, you can see short previews of select library items in the center as well as having full access to the library index (left sidebar). Some entries are written just for the tech library; most are promoted from forum posts, originally written by registered users like yourself. If you have something to add to the library, start a new Forum post in the appropriate subforum, or go to your Van Blog and write on!

    Van Blogs is a place where you, as a registered user, can document the history, restoration, repair or anything else of your own van, and also to blog your van journeys, post links to your YouTube van videos, links to your van photos on another site ... the possibilities are endless!

    To set up and customize the appearance of your Van Blog, look in the top right corner (your account links) and click on "Settings". Scroll down and click "Blog" at the very bottom left. Now you're in control!

    One important feature of your blog is that you can control who may comment on, or even view your blog. Don't get along with someone? Put them on your ignore list and change your Blog settings so they can't comment or view (your choice). Only want comments from some people? Put them on your "friends" (contacts) list, and give them the access privileges you want them to have. Want to document your van's progress without any chit-chat at all until you've made all the posts? Temporarily turn off comments!

    When using your Van Blog, please remember that the Forum Rules apply, and that we suggest, for privacy and security, you obscure license plate numbers and other unique identifying features before posting photos.

    Want to catch up on everything new, not just what's in the Forum? Set your bookmark to the ToyotaVanTech.com Library Home Page to see previews of new articles (center), recent blog entries (upper portion of the right sidebar), and the latest forum posts (middle of the right sidebar). You can also go to the upper left navigation bar at any time and click on "What's New", where the default setting brings up new forum posts. Using the sub-navigation bar at the upper left, you can also access new articles, new blog entries, and more.

    Do you want to reward the people who help you out? Are there threads that are especially useful ... or worthless? Do you like to discern easily which members who post the most useful content, and to let newcomers know which people they might want to steer clear of? You can do all that by voting on threads, and use the "add reputation" feature!

    At the very top of each thread is a gray bar; look on the right hand side and click on "rate this thread", where you can let people know what you think of the entire thread's resource value. The more votes each thread receives, the more useful the ratings become, so please add your vote whenever a particular thread floats your boat ... or makes you want to scream. The best threads can then be gleaned for our technical library; the worst will find their way to the bottom without you and others having to stoop to posting in them.

    To directly reward the people who help you out, help build their Reputation! Go to the end of the post (not the whole thread) that was useful to you and locate the six-pointed star icon toward the left side of the gray bar (if you hover over the icon, it will say "Reputation"). Click on the star icon to register your approval and to leave a comment if you desire. Or, if the post is terrible, you can also register your disapproval. Giving other members reputation points is a lasting way of saying "THANK YOU!!!" ... and it keeps our forum from becoming cluttered with thank-you and way-to-go posts that (unfortunately) get in the way of finding the important technical stuff when we need to find it.

    Members need to have made ten posts in the forum to be able to leave reputation (and if those posts are garbage posts, made just to reach the ten-post mark, they can expect to lose "rep power" through others disapproving of those posts ... so they still won't be able to leave reputation). Members can't give reputation based on the same post twice (although you can give reputation for as many posts in a single thread as you find appropriate), and the software is set up to keep people from only giving reputation to a select few people.

    Reputation levels are found by hovering over the green box icon below a person's avatar (each green box represents 100 points of reputation earned). You can check to see if you received reputation for a particular post by hovering over the reputation star icon in the posts you've made, and recent reputation received will also be listed on your "settings" page.

    "Rep power" is different from reputation, even though it depends on reputation to increase. For every 100 reputation points a member has earned from other members, their rep power increases by a factor of one. So if a member who has earned a higher reputation by making a lot of valuable contributions to ToyotaVanTech.com gives you reputation, you will receive more reputation points. "Rep power" is listed as the very last item within the member/poster information sidebar (running down the left side of all threads). Administrators have greater rep power by default ... and that works both for giving reputation and for taking it away!

    Unlike some forums, ToyotaVanTech's reputation levels and rep power are not affected by how long a member has been signed up, nor do they increase with the number of posts. You can be confident that rep power and reputation were earned.