New Website, BIG CHANGES! All you need to know.
The time has come to modernize, revolutionize, and bring a game changing new website to everyone.
In this document, you will find all you need to know about our new website, including features, how to use your account, and much more.
This site was no easy task. This was over a year in the working, with roadblocks apon roadblocks up until the day before release. Frankly, we lost hope toward the end that it will ever get done, but we now have a platform where we do not need brand new sites every update. This site is easily updatable, and alot more convenient to everyone.
This would not be possible without our spectacular team of developers. Lots of hands in the mix throughout the time, and they all deserve their own credit. Thank you to-
NoneVale_
Foaf
YesAviation
CharlesHacks
The dedication and hard work of these individuals are much appreciated and cannot be looked over.
Let's cut to the chase and great right into the nit and kabottle of this masterpiece.
Automation
One of the biggest, and most notable changes, is finally fully automated orders!
For over 3 years, we have done all of our orders through discord dms. Though this system was interactive, lately as we have been getting increasingly busy, it often times let people fall through the cracks, and wait times were incredibly long. This has been an issue we have been determined to fix, with automation.
No more waiting for stupid ol Redneck to reply to your dm, worry no more, apon your purchase, you will instantly receive a direct download link to the files you ordered, aswell as a link in your email.
Rejoice! No more waiting for dms back, or having to deal with google drive not showing proper products. All of this is done through our own dedicated system. This will allow much more free time for me to continue working on products for future releases, and possibly give myself some free time. This will also allow me not to have to worry so much about hopping on discord to check for orders especially during hunting season. We are now “open” 24 hours a day, 365 days a year! Woo!
Discord Integration
Discord is our backbone and always has been. It's our cool place to hang out, a place where I can reach you guys easily, and a place where we can have fun. We knew seamlessly integrating discord would be a critically important task to achieve. We wanted to make it as easy and as seamless as possible for you to link your discord to our new website, and after much trial and error, and lots of “20 minute breaks” , our awesome team was able to do it.
Upon signing up for our website, whether you are an existing customer or not, when you go onto your “store” account page at the top of the header, you will see a button called “Connect Discord”. Please make sure you are first, in our discord. If not, click the “DISCORD” button on our header. Once you hit the button, you click authorize, and you're linked! You should see your roles emulate onto the site.
*NOTE , until 6/8/21 , your Forum Roles for customers will remain as “member”. I will make an announcement once that is resolved and you will get your own cool roles. :)*
For new customers, this is the same process. Before or after your purchase, you are able to link your discord with a click of the button, and receive your roles within the discord almost instantly. This was the masterpiece work of our team once again, and the awesome new discord bots we have for this.
This site is focused very much on convenience for everyone, we knew we did not want a confusing linkage system, role request, or anything. Our team pulled through and got it fully automated, all you have to do is click a button!
Rewards & Discounts
For a few months ,we have had our Rewards program which was via patreon. This allowed many benefits, including rewards points and cash back. Until now, this was all manually calculated in our dms, and hope we got it right. This of course, like the rest, is now seamlessly integrated into our website.
Under our “Rewards” Tab, you can now see all of our tiers, their benefits, and easily subscribe. This is now all handled in one place rather than patreon. In benefit to you guys, this system also only charges you 30 days AFTER your purchase, that way if you purchase a few days before the end of the month, you aren't charged again on the first of the next month.
With this, all of our Rewards members are eligible for our cash back system. This is now all automated thru our site, once you are subscribed to a certain tier, it will calculate your rewards percentage, and as you purchase, you automatically accumulate points! This menu can be accessed on the bottom right of your screen named “REWARDS”.
To claim your rewards points, you will see on that tab there are many different coupons to redeem which you use at checkout. Make sure it's the amount you want BEFORE purchase as these can’t be reset, or if the coupon is more then your order total it will kick back with a decline. These coupons do not expire, so no fret, just make sure it's the amount you want prior to checkout!
Our rewards program is not the only new customer appreciation system on our website. We heard and listened, a lot of our customers are first responders, active duty, or even veterans. Thanks to the GOVX app, we now have a discount for you. Under the about us tab, you will see ‘First Responders”. This explains in detail what this system is.
With GOVX , our first responders and military customers are able to log in with their GOVX account before checkout. This will generate a coupon code for you to use on your purchase for 10% off. This applies to ANY and ALL Products, new, old , and in between. Please note due to app limitation, only one code can be generated per day. We are more than thrilled to implement this system, and look forward to it being used alot by our many first responders, military, and veterans who are customers here!
Lastly, our new site allows for easier implementation and announcement of sales. Instead of confusing announcements, and having to mathematically calculate the total of your order during a sale, our system does it automatically. We are able to do sales for everyone, certain groups, or even coupon codes. For sales that are sitewide and member wide, the discounts are automatically applied at checkout. For promo-code sales, you simply just enter your promo-code at checkout, and it will update your total. Finally, if we decide to do customer only sales, etc, if you have your proper roles on our website, you will be eligible for such.
Nothing too crazy with that, but definitely something that is nice and we are happy to finally implement for everyone!
Payment Diversity
It has been well known that not everyone uses paypal. It has its fair share of drawbacks, but has been the most convenient platform of purchasing for us for the past 3 years. Recently I have noticed a lot more people have been requesting other forms of payment, well ,we delivered.
With our new website, we offer over 11 different payment methods, including but not limited to-
PayPal
Google Pay
Apple Pay
Any Major Credit Card
Any Major Debit Card holder
Shop Pay
In the future, we will work our hardest to expand into more requested forms of payment, and some other things which i'll keep secret for now ;). But no fret now! With payment diversity, you now will have many options to pay with a choice that is most convenient to you, rather than being limited to PayPal.
Discussion Forum
The next major part of our site is focused on community. We have always been more than thankful to have such a large community that is diversified in many different types of people, types of talents, and interests. We realized this and did not want this to just be a place where you come, purchase, and go. We have always been focused on our community aspect and how we could improve it.
When you sign up to our website, you also are signed up and linked automatically with your store account to our forum account. Upon logging in, click our Forum tab, where you will be able to see our forum pages, and your forum profile. You can edit everything from your profile images, descriptions, name, and more.
Our forum is focused on discussion and interaction. Here you will find categories related to development, being tips and tricks about programs such as Blender or Photoshop, where anyone can start a new topic explaining something cool they learned, or ask for help. We also have a customer corner, for our customers to post screenshots of things they purchased, ask questions, and have general discussions. We also plan in the near future to implement all of our applications onto our website for the ease of everyone.
On top of this, we have also implemented our important news and announcements here. You will be able to see any important announcements, changes, etc all on our forum as well as our blog, and discord. We also have our monthly challenge category, which will be updated every month for a new challenge! Which I will explain below. We hope to see you guys enjoy the forum and use it to gain knowledge on how things work, whether related to development or not.
Customer Competitions
As noted previously, our philosophy for this new site has been to make it more than just a place to purchase. With this ,we have implemented customer competitions!
Every month, I will post the new month's competition and prizes. These competitions will be random, and may or may not be related to our content. To enter these competitions, please read the competition rules and description on our forum. You can then proceed to our discord and in our #competition-submissions channel, and post your entry! You are only able to enter once per competition, and you must be a customer to do this.
Over time, we will make the challenges more unique, harder, and maybe even open entries to everyone if all goes well. The harder the challenge, the bigger the prize!
Also related, is our new #purchase-leaderboard channel! This channel will track all users on the site, and will list the top 10 purchasers of the month by total amount purchased. At the end of each month, we will take the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners and they will receive a hefty prize for their support and dedication! These prizes will likely change over the months and hopefully get a lot more aggressive in the process.
We look forward to seeing you guys participate in these challenges, and look forward to hearing feedback on how we can improve these, and do more cool, interactive stuff!
Lastly, we now have our own starboard! On any screenshots in our #screenshots channel, you can react with a :starrnm: emoji. Once this reaches a certain amount of stars, the screenshot will be automatically put in #featured-screenshots and will be a candidate to be featured on our social media pages, our site, and much more!
Merchandise Integration
Rather small to most, but we have finally also merged our merchandise system with our main store! This means, you can purchase merchandise, a model , and a rewards subscription all at the same time, rather than hopping websites!
Currently, our Graphical team is in the works to come up with some fresh, brand new designs, and we plan to do merch drops and new products often! There will be announcements when these happen and will be easily accessible by everyone in our store.
Discount codes, promotions, and cash back rewards all also work on merch now! Merch lovers rejoice, when theres a sale, merch is also on sale!
Discord Notes & Changes
Lastly, I will note our changes in our discord here as well. We already discussed our new challenge channels, but we have made some changes to our community channels and made our discord alot easier to navigate, including-
- Removed ALL Listing channels, and compiled it into one, #new-arrivals channel
- Added #scratch-wip and #scratch-showcase for our beloved scratch modelers to post their work.
- #merch & #patreon channels have been removed since they are now integrated into our site
- #mincraft-screenshots has been renamed to #game-screenshots for various games.
- Changed #development-showcase to #ingame-showcase
- Updated various channels and roles.
These were more noted in our June 2021 Newsletter, but we put them here for note as well. This gives our discord a nice, new refreshed feel!
Conclusion
To conclude, this has been a massive undertaking. This was planned for over a year, and took about a year from start to finish, through many developers and roadblocks to formally complete. There were times I just wanted to release it to be done with it, but I knew it would not be what I envisioned. The wait paid off, and we now have an innovative and revolutionary site which is 1000x more convenient to everyone.
From all of us here at Redneck Modifications, we hope you enjoy this site to the fullest. If you have any questions, suggestions, or bug reports, please feel free to put them in #website-bugs , as we may have thought we tested everything, big releases like this are hard to perfect, and like any human, there are bound to be mistakes.
I once again want to thank the ever tiring work that our technical division put in to make this happen. Without them, none of what we do would be remotely possible and I owe a lot of gratitude and thanks to the people involved, as no amount of money will be able to repay such great work they have done for us.
Stay safe, and thank you once again for all of your support. We look forward to the next 6 months of 2021 and years to come, and paving the way for awesome content , creations, and fun!
Sincerely,
Redneck
Redneck
Head Developer