Apologies for the site downtime since yesterday – it was necessary to roll out and test a list of upgrades that had been building up.

Nothing much has changed visually beyond a tidy up of the menus and the ‘bringing inside’ of several areas like news and blog – anything that allows user comments...Apologies for the site downtime since yesterday – it was necessary to roll out and test a list of upgrades that had been building up.

Nothing much has changed visually beyond a tidy up of the menus and the ‘bringing inside’ of several areas like news and blog – anything that allows user comments essentially

On that note about comments a note – new members won’t be able to see News articles from before their time so some News areas may look a little spartan initially.

The big change was that there are now four types of Member:

- Full Members – that’s you heroes who pay £2 a month to keep the club running. Thank you.
- Remote Members – that’s for people who aren’t likely to visit but want to chat with kindred spirits and may take advantage of MeetYouThere Travel. They can’t see events and need to ask to join groups and can’t take advantage of offers and there are various other restrictions but it’s a tenner a year to chat to us so..
- Specialist – there can be only one (per group). These are the guys who will happily answer questions on their chosen field as they own and run related businesses. Currently that’s Sean the SUP and Dave the Bike.
- Subs Due – that’s where you get put when you need to put a coin in the meter – you can still log in, view your profile and pay but that’s pretty much it. Since the Club works only by PayPal subscription you should never end up there but new members go there automatically on registration – there are no more temporary or trial memberships (that’s partly what Remote is for). Equally for anti-trolling reasons people aren’t able comment until they are identified and a financial transaction is the best way to do that..

..plus of course the not-logged-in ‘Public’ side of the site where I need to walk a tightrope between keeping the site busy for SEO reasons and protecting people’s privacy – generally where I’m at on that is no Member’s comments can find their way outside (that was part of this work).

Next on the list was Dynamic Redirects. These allow the system to hyperspace you to a particular page based on your role when you login. Generally that’s the Club Chat page (tho not for ‘Subs Due’ ofc) but (in the case of Full Members here..) you will see a message reminding you that you are fully paid up and there’s a dedicated Full Members page at the top of the Menu – that’s not used yet but will probably contain information for your eyes only. There a lot to explore with the personalisation available in dynamic linking, but only when it’s raining.

The Chat page now defaults to 'all' rather than just 'your friends' – you miss less that way so its much better.

Photos are no longer shown on every page as doing so slowed down the loading.

And for those that are technically minded we add:
- Full, strict end to end encryption to TLS1.3

Busy time for me in dev & test but the rainy, awful, relentlessly dreary ‘monsoon June’ really helped me bull through it.

There Will Be Bugs. Of course there will it’s a big upgrade – please report them in the Support page or by email to [email protected] and I will try and fix them one at a time.

Unless its sunny, when I go..

To The Beach! Show more