Referrals

It’s the number of people who sign up for an account here on the site that use your name as some one who “referred” them to BBB. That’s all it is. 🙂 (At least as far as I know 🙂 )

Ah… my apologies for the RATHER late reply.

Referrals are a part of vBulletin that will help BigBlueBall grow and give YOU credit for it! To see how many referrals you’ve made, just go take a look at your profile :).

To use the referral system, you send a url that’s in the following format to your friends, family and colleagues:
http://www.biglubeall.com/forums/index.php?referrerid=[user number]

[user number] in my case would be 45485 and in your case it would be 44757.

Once you’ve done that, the system is supposed to only count a real referral if the user you referred registers (I haven’t exactly tested this yet, but it seems to add it if someone just visits the link…).

when you view your profile you see a number in the url of the page. Amy, your usernumber is 40801 because your profile link is: https://bigblueball.com/forums/member.php?userid=40801

Firstly, to complement this topic, HERE is the relevant FAQ section on referrals.
(It really bugs me that such info is always fragmented – one must not only Search Forums but ALSO Search FAQs).

But, I dispute that FAQ info!!
It gives a link, and says it’ll work (as is, I assume!), but in fact it shows referrerid=0, so I’m sure that as is it will NOT work, for MY particular id for instance.
(EvilSeth’s post, above, adds the “truth” to the matter!?).

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Further, let me clarify another point which I found very hard to piece together:

…Whenever you view a thread, you will find a link somewhere on the page which will allow you to send a brief message to anyone you like. Your referrerid is added to the link you send…

Well, at last I DID find that link… under Topic Tools, then Email This Page. 🙂

Indeed that appears to work fine, and may be an easier method than the messy copy/pasting involved in your idea, Seth ?

Oh, typical computers … everything probably IS “there” – but not necessarily in “logical” places (which is hard anyway, as there are usually so MANY things to be crammed in) – so once familiar these things are easy, but for newbies – not just to PCs but even to specific programs – is it any wonder they often just throw their PCs out the window ? 🙁

I am one who doesn’t MIND reading the docs – but I DO strongly object when even those docs are wrong, incomplete, or misleading. 😡

just to update this to more accurately reflect how things work now… our “friendly url” system doesnt show your member number anymore. for example, whereas before it might have been http://bigblueball.com/forums/member.php?userid=46251, now it just displays as http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/members/tigerblade.html. so you can’t get your member id number there. what you can do is view your profile, and click the link that says “Find All Posts By membername” – that will still include your user id. for example, mine: http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/search.php?do=finduser&u=46251 so my user id is 46251.