Hi everyone,

It’s absolutely wonderful to see these message boards filling up with so much valuable help and information.  Please do keep the posts and replies coming - you never know who else may find your particular pearl of wisdom to be just the thing they needed!

The website team had a meeting recently to review how things are going with the new site and to plan future developments.  One or two issues arose which I’d like to share with you all:

Registration - We’ve had to tighten up the registration process a bit to ensure only bona fide applications are enabled.  Also the Council of Management wants to have certain areas of the site restricted to TOFS members only.  We’re taking a step-by-step approach to implementing this and are starting with membership of these forums.  So from now on only members of TOFS will be able to register, post messages and get the full benefits of registration, but anyone will still be able to read their content.  Thanks to all of you who have responded to Helene’s e-mail asking for your names and postal and e-mail addresses.  This is so that we can match up forum members to the main TOFS membership database.  If you’ve already joined and are not a member of TOFS obviously we would strongly encourage you to join up.

AOL Users – I’m an AOL user and have experienced a few problems – I submitted a post which didn’t appear, when I tried to print a thread it didn’t come out particularly well (we’ve specifically designed the site and forums to print properly onto A4 in Portrait), and the RSS feed button didn’t work.  Everything works absolutely fine if you access the site directly from Internet Explorer so we presume the problems are down to AOL’s browser.  So if you do use AOL I suggest you access the site directly from Internet Explorer to obtain full functionality.

Log on to the forums – Although you can read all the messages without being logged on you will find much greater functionality if you do log in when visiting the site.  This will happen automatically if you tick the ‘Remember Me’ check box on registration.

RSS Feeds – You will need an RSS Feed Reader for this to work.  Internet Explorer 7 has one built in, otherwise you will have to download one.  For more information on RSS feeds go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm for a helpful explanation from the BBC.

Organisation of Messages – Virtually all of the threads are in the ‘About TOFS’ section but should be in the ‘TOF/OA’ section.  We’re going to have a bit of a sort out soon so don’t be surprised if you find we’ve moved them!

If anyone has any constructive suggestions about the future development of the site, please do post your ideas here.

Thanks

Mike Brown (TOFS Trustee – Publications)