Trade Officer
As one of the original instigators of the current website, along with Steve Young, I feel I need to give a bit of history here
David Macarthy put together the previous website. He was a professional web builder using WordPress and so he built the Society’s site based on that and I think he did it FOC. He also supported it FOC. At the time the Society didn’t deem it necessary to pay for ongoing support for the licencing and so newer versions were not implemented. David sadly passed away about 4-5 years ago and with him all the knowledge of how the website worked. As my background was in IT I spent several months looking at how it worked. However, because there was no support in place, and the software was at least 6-7 versions behind, no changes could feasibly be made without potential problems. The decision was made to replace it, but as we were in a position of potential problems killing the site, a replacement had to be built quickly. We chose to continue with WordPress as porting the data was very straightforward and quick, plus there were a lot of companies that supported it. to answer Dave’s question the whole process of consultation would probably have taken a year before we even started to the build process
Myself and Steve Young spent several months working with Blinkweb to build the current site and port the existing data. As an aside, if we hadn’t moved to the new website the virtual show during lockdown would not have been possible.
At first we didn’t implement a forum as the previous forum was scarcely used. However, we got a lot of requests for one. We looked at BBPHP but that required a separate server plus it needed a bridge to WordPress to enable a single login. As a quick fix we decided on BBPress (it is a specific WordPress plug in) as neither myself or Steve had the time do any proper research. Also, despite appeals in the Newsletter for volunteers to help, there were none forthcoming.
To be blunt, all of the comments are about the forum and not about the general usefulness of the site itself. As the Trade Officer I know it is used extensively to buy items from the stores. The gallery is visited frequently. The Manual Sheets have proved useful to many members. The newsletters and individual articles are stored on the website.
If the only problem is the forum then a group of 5 or 6 members need to get together and look at what is around and how to link it to the current website. And then decide if it is actually worth the effort and cost.
There is obviously an issue with logging in which is relatively recent. To be fair no one has actually reported it. I suspect the introduction of the “Are You Human” check is giving problems. This seems to have changed since the server farm introduced it. I have raised a ticket with our supplier
Finally, from my experience, mass emails will miss at least 200 of our members (no email registered) and paper versions will be binned by and large. I believe it has been tried in the past by the Society
Sorry it was such a long reply but I have been answering most of the above questions over the last 4 years and wanted to put all of the answers together in a single post.
John