Hi all

I have posted on other threads that we have secured the future of the website, including the forum. There will be a formal announcement shortly of how this is planned to work.

Meanwhile as part of creating new support we want to ensure that there is broader base of people involved for a variety of obvious reasons including: spreading the load so that individuals are not required to be involved 24/7; and being more resilient when people find they cannot devote their time to the task.

You will therefore see why the subject is "Can you help?". A number of people were kind enough to say how much they valued the Forum and the information on the website. Now is the chance to translate that into some practical support and the first task is to identify some additional "moderators" for the Forum.

To make the Forum a good place for discussion we need to do three things at least:

• Stop spam: once an odd message arrives - usually with a link in to a dodgy website - it needs deleting as quickly as possible and the account from which it has come needs to be locked. A lot of this happens automatically but some spam needs to be dealt with manually. There are some other ways to prevent repeated spamming but these will be done by the technical webmasters.
  
• Help people keep to the rules: there are a few points - eg not posting direct email addresses or personal information for living people - where posters need occasional gentle reminders about the right approach and maybe how to amend their posting.
  
• Give posters useful pointers: although we hope the website is easy to use there are occasions where we can help people get maximum benefit by pointing them to resources or helping them to use the search.

All of that makes it easier for people to engage in the wider discussions about finding ancestors and links to places.

None of this is very onerous but it would be better if 4 or 5 people were keeping an eye on things.

If you would like to help please either post here or email admin2 directly (click on the link next to the name in the header).

Many thanks

Paul

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Admin 2