You may have noticed that, with a significant amount of help from Stephen O’Donnell, we've got a new discussion forum on the site. The reasons for this are twofold; after working with us for nearly 10 years Willco, who ran the old forum, have decided to stop supporting forums as part of their business offering.
Luckily, we were prepared as we've been looking for a way to add registration and more social networking functionality to the forum (as per user requests) for a while.
The result is that we've moved to new provider with the following new features
– Forum posts can be read by anyone but you need to register to post
– Posts can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a couple of other sites using the links on the far left
– There is no pre-post moderation. Whatever time of day (or night) you post the comment will go immediately live
What's not changed:
– Rules for posting stay the same
– We'll still be regularly monitoring the forum
– The top 3 posts will be referenced in the newsletter each week
With the addition of a "reporting" feature I'm hoping for a self-policing clientele as well as lots of different opinions and lively debate.
On the old forum we had over 4000 posts in two years (some of them were spam or libellous mind!). I'm pretty sure that pre registration will mean slightly less posts – but hopefully more valuable, interesting, worthwhile ones. Give it a go!
