The Lincolnshire Bird Club

I’m pleased to announce that after a lot of hard work culminating in a full discussion at our committee meeting on 28th November, our new look website and forum will be launched on Friday 10th December. The URL will continue to be www.lincsbirdclub.co.uk.

Colin Casey and Andrew Chick have both mentioned on the forum the security risks our aged systems have exposed us too, chief of which is being locked out of our own forum by hackers. Shortly that concern will melt away and I’d like to thank Colin and Andrew for all their hard work and the way they’ve worked together to give us our new platform.

The new website gives us better opportunities to provide members with more resources including exclusive information together with an up to date payment and membership system. The new resources include an online Lincolnshire list with details of all records for rarities and much more detail on scarce migrants. We are building this now and its work in progress and I’d like to thank Andrew Henderson and Phil Hyde for the work they are putting into making all our records more accessible to members.

Forum users will be pleased to hear the forum will continue, but it will be members only to view and post. The existing forum will be locked into an archive accessible to members.

Other resources will include a twitter feed of bird reports, links to our Facebook page for posting photographs you wish to share, detailed site guides to Lincolnshire birding sites, an archive on articles/papers about Lincolnshire birds and our new newsletter. There will also be a better system for submitting records of all birds and an easier method for verifying scarcer birds.

Another benefit the new website provides is a fully automatic membership control system. New members will be able to sign up online and pay their membership dues via Paypal using a credit or debit card. Existing members who are on direct debit, payment by cash or cheque will be able to continue their current payment method or switch to Paypal should they choose to do so. One important aspect of this is that members will be responsible for maintaining their own contact details. We have a real problem where we are not advised when contact details are changed.

For that reason if you don’t pay your membership when it falls due, you’ll be sent email reminders and then locked out of the system until you sign up with your contact details and pay. This will mean that if your existing direct debit fails to reach us for any reason you’ll be on a credit/debit card basis from thereon in.

So how is this all going to happen? Well a small sub-set of 20 members already have access and we’ve been trialing the new login system with them. The big issue that came out was that 25% of email addresses in our records were not current. Hopefully most of the glitches have been ironed out but when a further 250 people come on board its possible further issues will arise and probable many more email addresses will be out of date.

We will be sending out a newsletter in the next 24 hours. If you don't get it, it means we do not have a correct email address for you. If your email address bounces on us we will contact you personally, by phone and if needed by letter.

This forum will be locked from Tuesday night and on Wednesday Colin will be securing it and then importing members from the old to the the new site.

On Thursday or Friday you will receive an email containing your new user name, which may well be your old user name, and a system generated password. When you successfully access the system you can change your password to whatever you want. If you have any problems logging on please contact Colin Casey on colin@otus.co.uk. If we get more problems than we expect, Colin may get overwhelmed in which case please be patient or if you feel the need, email me on chairman@lincolnshirebirdclub.co.uk.

If you don’t get an email with your log in details it is almost certainly because we have been unable to contact you and still do not have a current valid email address for you. If that happens and you are a paid up member please email Colin with your up to date email address and he will send you log in details.

If you are a lapsed member whose subscriptions has not been paid, please sign up as a new member using your credit/debit card.

Hopefully everything will go smoothly and in any event the committee look forward to receiving your feedback about the new website and forum.

Follow me on twitter @philespin