Running your chapter site

Do this before anything else. The whole-roster import that builds your family tree in one go only works while the roster is empty — the moment one brother signs up, it switches to adding one class at a time.

1. Download the roster worksheet (three columns: Name · Pledge Class · Big; one page of instructions) and fill it in. Founders have no big — leave that cell blank. Spell every name and class the same way each time.
2. Open the 🎓 Pledge Classes tab → ⬆ Import a class from CSV → pick your file.
3. Read the preview: it lists every brother, his class and his big, and flags anything it can't match. Nothing is written until you press Apply.
4. Press Apply. The tree, the rosters and the Active/Alumni pages fill in immediately.

There is no undo. If the preview looks wrong, fix the spreadsheet and pick the file again — that is free. Only press Apply on a preview you'd put your name to. (Fixing one man afterwards is easy in the 🌳 Tree tab; fixing three hundred is not.)

Then go to ✉️ Invite and start inviting brothers to claim their names.

1. Open the Pending tab (the number shows how many are waiting — the 🔔 bell also alerts you).
2. Check the name/pledge class look right (edit if needed).
3. Click Approve. He's instantly live on the roster, family tree, gallery and board.

You only approve a brother once. After that he can edit his own profile — photo, city, job, bio — and it publishes immediately without coming back to you. Brothers cannot approve themselves; the database enforces that, not the website.

Not a real brother? Click Reject — they never appear publicly.

• The public sees the homepage and a demo family tree with fake names — no real brother names anywhere.
• Anyone signed in — including someone still waiting on your approval — sees member names and the tree, because that is how a brother finds and claims his own name. Contact details, profiles, photos, the gallery and the board stay closed until you approve him.
• Approved brothers see everything: full profiles, photos, gallery, board, directory.

• 🗂 All Brothers — every brother in one list, whatever his status, with his big and class. Start here when you just want to find someone. It also flags anyone with no big: the family tree draws a brother with no big as his own family line, so those are worth fixing — click Edit to set one.
• Pending — brothers who signed up (or claimed a name) and are waiting for your approval.
• Approved — brothers with a real account, approved by you. These are your active members.
• 📋 Unclaimed — every roster name from the chapter records that nobody has claimed yet. They show on the public tree/rosters, just without an account behind them.
• Rejected — declined signups; restorable anytime.

1. Go to the 📋 Unclaimed tab → click + Add brother. (Or use the 🌳 Tree tab → “+ Little” on his big.)
2. Enter his name, pledge class, grad year, and pick his big.
3. He appears in the tree immediately as “unclaimed” — if he later signs up, he claims his own name.

1. 📋 Unclaimed tab → + Add pledge class.
2. Type the class name (e.g. “Gamma Sigma · Fall '26”), paste the names one per line.
3. On step 2, pick each new brother's big → Add brothers. Done — tree and rosters update instantly.

By default the site decides from the grad year: future grad year = Active page, past = Alumni page. The green/gray chip next to each name here shows the current result — hover it to see whether it came from the grad year or was set by hand.

1. Find the brother (search box) → Edit.
2. Either fix the Grad year, or use the Active / Alumni dropdown to put him on a page outright — handy for a brother who took a year off, transferred, or graduated early. Leave it on Auto to go back to the grad year.
3. Save. The chip and the public pages flip immediately.

A brother can also set this himself in his own profile, and it is the same setting — so if he changes it after you, his choice is the one that sticks.

Use the dedicated 🌳 Tree tab — it shows each family line as an indented list with plain buttons on every brother: Rename, Change big, + Little, Remove. There's a “❓ How do I use this?” button inside with step-by-step instructions. Every save is live on the public tree instantly.

Use the 👑 E-Board tab. The Active and Alumni boards are separate — each has four seats. Click Assign on a seat, pick the brother and term; the previous holder automatically moves to “Previous officers” (shown on the Alumni page with title filters). Each semester, hit 🔄 Semester rollover once, then assign the new boards.

👥 Committees tab: create a committee (e.g. Rush Committee), add brothers with accounts. Each committee gets a private space on the Board that only its members and you can see. Current officers are auto-kept in the “E-Board Officers” committee.

On the Board page → 🗳️ Polls tab → “+ New poll”. Brothers get one vote each and can change it until the poll closes.

Any brother can post a poll and edit or delete his own. If you ever need to clean up someone else’s, you can — and you can hand that power to an officer with the Moderate polls switch in the Officers tab (it starts off).

Brothers drop ideas in the Suggestion box on the Board page. They land in your 💡 Suggestions tab (badge = new ones). Write a response — the brother gets a 🔔 — or archive it.

Brothers fill in industry, company, and LinkedIn on their profiles, and can raise "I'm open to…" badges (🎓 Being a Mentor · 🌱 Being a Mentee · 🤝 Connecting). On any brother's card, the Connect button drops the requester's name + email into the other brother's 🔔 so he can reply directly by email.

• Nothing for you to moderate — there's no inbox or chat, just intro requests.
• Built-in anti-spam: one request per brother per recipient per week.
• All of it is members-only; the public never sees contact details.
• Members have their own “❓ How networking works” guide on the Mentoring page.

🎓 Request a mentor: an active picks a field on the Mentoring page and up to five brothers who volunteered to mentor in it get a 🔔 with his name and email. Capped and rate-limited (one request per brother per week) so nobody gets spammed. If nobody has raised the mentoring flag in that field yet, he's told to reach out directly instead.

The calendar is members-only — the public sees a sign-in card instead. Two ways to add events:

• Right on the calendar (easiest): sign in and open the Events page, click any day, press ＋ Add event on this day. Use ✎ Edit / 🗑 Delete on an event to change it in place.
• Here in the console: Events tab → + New event (same fields, plus the announcement banner editor).

Tick All-day for things without a start time. If you type a location, it becomes a map link automatically. Brothers RSVP with one tap so you know who's coming.

Most brothers on the tree have no account — so they never see the gallery, the board, the directory, or the digest. The ✉️ Invite tab fixes that:

1. Paste up to 25 email addresses, one per line.
2. Press Send invitations. Each brother gets a personal email saying his name is already on the tree, with a button to claim it. These are queued alongside the newsletter, so they arrive within a day rather than instantly.
3. The link is smart: if he already has an account it opens Log in; if not, it opens Create account with his email filled in.
4. When he signs up he lands in your Pending tab — approve him once. The invite list marks him ● Joined.

Only invite brothers you know. This is a personal invitation, not a mailing list.

Once a month every brother with an account gets one email: upcoming events, new job posts, new brothers, gallery activity, pledge-class anniversaries, mentoring, and anything new on the site. It sends itself automatically — but there is one thing that needs you, below.

✨ Approve what it says about new features. Everything in the 📬 Digest tab. When something new ships, a short note about it is filed there as a draft — you read it, then Approve, Edit the wording, or Discard it. A draft is never sent. The digest fetches only approved notes, so silence on your part means that month simply has no "New on the site" section — it can never send words you have not read. You can also write your own note, which arrives already approved because you wrote it.

The send controls live in the ✉️ Invite tab:

• 👁 Preview it — see exactly what this month's email looks like. Sends nothing.
• ✉️ Send a test to me — mails it only to you. Always do this first.
• 📬 Send to all brothers — sends it now, ahead of schedule. Rarely needed.

Big sends are queued, not blasted. Brotherhood email and password resets now go through different services, so a newsletter can never use up the allowance a brother needs to reset his password. A message to everyone is queued and clears on the next quarter-hour — you'll see “Queued for N brothers”, and you can close the page. Send a test to me and Preview are instant, as always.

Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and brothers can toggle it themselves under My Profile → Account. If nothing happened in the chapter that month, the email says so gracefully rather than arriving empty.

The 🎁 Alumni Fund tab holds one thing: the Venmo handle brothers send to, and a switch for whether the page is visible at all. It is the alumni president's personal Venmo, so treat changing it as his decision, not yours.

Only you can change it. The alumni president can see the handle in his own console but cannot edit it — that is enforced in the database, not just hidden. If you turn the page off, brothers see nothing rather than a blank place to send money.

A brother can ask for an office he held to be recorded — he picks the title, the season and the year. It shows on nobody's profile until you approve it in the 🎖 Title requests tab (the number tells you how many are waiting).

One thing to know: an approved request records the title but attaches it to no board. It shows on his profile and on no Executive Board. The 👑 E-Board tab lists these under Not on any board so you can put them on the right board on the Executive Boards page — or leave them, which is fine; they are correct on the profile either way.

The 📧 Email tab writes to everyone, one pledge class, or brothers you pick — with attachments. Unsubscribed brothers are always skipped, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.

It only reaches brothers with accounts. A brother whose address is on the roster but who never signed up will not receive it — invite him first (✉️ Invite). Large sends are queued and clear over the following quarter-hours, so "Queued for N brothers" is success, not a delay you need to sit and watch.

The 📜 History tab is the chapter's audit trail: anything that deleted something or changed who can do what, including your own actions and every action the alumni president takes, under his name. Everyday noise — photos, comments, profile edits — is deliberately left out so the serious entries are findable.

It is a record, not a control panel: nothing here can be undone from here.

The 🛡 Officers tab is the switchboard for the alumni president's console. Every power is off until you turn it on, each row explains in plain English exactly what it does and does not allow, and every change is logged.

Two things this cannot do. It cannot give anyone your account — the admin console is tied to your email address and nothing in this tab changes that. And nothing he does can reach your own brother record: he cannot rename you, or add or remove a chapter title on you. That is enforced in the database.

The 🖼 Gallery tab manages the sections photos are filed under, and shows how much storage is left (10 GB free; you get an email long before it matters). Deleting a section never deletes photos — they move to Miscellaneous.

Photos and comments are moderated on the gallery page itself, where you can see what you are removing. Sign in on the main site and the delete controls appear for you on every post.

The 🧭 Mentoring tab decides who appears on the Mentoring page and on which list — Mentors, Mentees, or just open to connecting. Brothers normally set this themselves on their own profile; this is for fixing a mistake, or adding the man who asked you in person.

A brother is on a list only if his box is ticked. Nobody is listed automatically.

The gold medallions on the homepage come from the 🏅 Awards tab. When your school announces next year's Greek awards: + Add award → type the year (e.g. “2025–26”), pick the pillar, give it its title. The homepage switches to the newest year automatically and keeps older years as an archive you can flip through.

On the homepage, brothers can drag the tree with a finger or mouse, pinch or scroll to zoom, use the toolbar at the bottom of the tree, and press ⛶ for a fullscreen view. The dropdown above the tree picks a family line. None of that needs your attention — it just works.

Sign in on the main site as admin — you can delete any gallery post, comment, board thread, or reply (delete links appear for you on each item). Brothers can attach photos to threads and react 👍 ❤️ 😂 to replies; deleting a thread or reply removes its photo and reactions with it.

Stats tab: registrations, pending queue, 30-day activity, recent sign-ins, and a full activity log.

💾 Your data → Download your data. You get one .zip. It is your chapter's information and you never need our permission to take it.

• csv/ — spreadsheets that open straight in Excel or Google Sheets: the roster with contact details, who is whose big, every e-board and who held which title, awards, events with RSVP counts, the alumni fund, and the photo list. The lineage is the part that cannot be rebuilt from anything else, and the file to hand the next webmaster.
• json/ — the same information exactly as the database holds it, one file per table. This is the copy to hand a developer.

We also back it up for you every night and keep the last seven, plus one a month for a year. That runs on its own — the button above is for when you want a copy.

Three honest limits, so nothing surprises you later:

• The photos are not in it. Images live in Cloudflare storage; the file lists them (who posted each, its caption, its year, its album) so they can be matched back up. Ask us and we will hand you the whole photo archive — and if you ever leave, it comes with you.
• It is your content, not your logins. Member accounts and passwords live in the sign-in system and are deliberately not in the file — we will not put anybody's password, even scrambled, in something that gets emailed around. So it rebuilds your roster, tree, boards and history; it is not a one-click "put the site back". That part is our job.
• Treat the file as confidential. It carries members' emails and phone numbers. Invite links and unsubscribe links are never included, because either one would let whoever held the file act as a brother.

Take one whenever you like — at handover is the obvious moment — and keep a copy somewhere that is not this laptop.

• This console only works for the admin email (currently your chapter's admin address). When the webmaster changes, tell ChapterRoots the new person's email — moving the console to them is one change on our side, and nothing in the chapter's data moves.
• Brothers who forget passwords use “Forgot your password?” on the site — you never manage their passwords.
• Hosting, security updates and backups are handled for you; there is nothing to renew. If the chapter owns its own domain, that is the one thing to keep paid each year (~$12/yr at any registrar).