Year Three Memberships
Hello
Due to a change to the way we will be operating the forum, and the fact that the change requires a lot of technical jiggery pokery we're not in a position to accept year three memberships just yet.
So, despite the fact that your membership cards expired about an hour ago, the club will grant an extension to the year 2 memberships until we can begin accepting year three applications.
If you’re already a year 2 member then please continue to use the allotment and other club benefits as usual. Those who are not, don’t worry, we’ll have it sorted before you can say…”so what’s a TickerTape anyways?”
We're aiming to have all this in place for Tuesday the 6th April 2010 but will have to update you when we know a little more.
Thanks for your patience
New BCC Forum
We're moving to a custom BCC forum, on the BCC website, so will soon stop using the southerndownhill.com club forum.
The move to the new forum will include a period of about a month where we have both, for handover purposes. You will be given new usernames and passwords for the BCC website and Forum when you join up for year three.
Rob Lewis (southerndownhill.com) has been incredibly helpful and generous in providing the club with both forum space and website hosting since we started back in 2008. We're making this move for a number of reasons, all of which will benefit the club, but (and this is important) this is not being done because we don't want to be a part of SDH or because they don't want to have us.
We need to provide a forum that is more club focused, in terms of it's functionality, ease of use, and visibility from our website. The SDH forum is in many ways better than our BCC forum, but it's just not quite right for the current and future needs of the club.
The new BCC forum will be part of the BCC website, it'll also be very simple. This is something that has caused problems amongst many members who've struggled to find their way onto the current forum - while not actually very hard, it could be easier. This is important as people who are active on the club forum are the ones who are most active within the club. Of course this is a case of chicken and egg, but it's clear that by making the forum easier to use, more people will use it and then more people will get involved in club activities.
The new forum will display some threads to the public so that people can see what's going on... other threads will be only visible to members once logged in, meaning that we can retain the private nature of the club forum too. As part of this change we will be able to provide 'members only' website content aswel, meaning that we can have areas for people to upload route maps, see club resources resources etc etc...
In addition the change will enable us to conform to online Child Protection best practice more easily, something that really is very important especially as we are growing in numbers.
So a valuable change all round...but...
All that aside, I'd like to say a special thank you to Rob Lewis for all his help, it's probable that we would never have even existed at all if it wasn't for the fact that some of the original Longleat riders first met on the SDH forum, and then were able to use it when setting up the club. I hope that many of you stay active members of SDH, I know I will.
