This article was published in 2006, in Newsletter 65.
We’re changing the way our mailing lists work. And we are about to start two more: one to deal with the current consultation about changes to the Highway Code, and another to deal with city centre traffic management. Please ask us if you want to join.
The Cycling Campaign runs quite a few e-mail discussion lists. Many of you are subscribed to our general members’ discussion group; others are on mailing lists for particular subgroups or topics. We also use these for the teams working on preparing the newsletter and – a very busy list – for the committee.
We have used Yahoo! Groups as host for these until now. But we have found Yahoo increasingly unreliable. There have been inexplicable delays in e-mail messages arriving or being forwarded. People keep getting barred from Yahoo’s system because of overenthusiastic spam detectors. And Yahoo stopped saving e-mail attachments in its message archives some time back.
So we are moving all our lists gradually over to a new system that we have much more control over and we hope will be less susceptible to problems. The archives are stored on our own website, complete with attachments, and the mailing lists themselves are now being managed in the Cycling Campaign’s name by a local company, Mythic Beasts.
At the same time, we have introduced a new feature to our website which allows you to have a personal log in – just click on the link called ‘Sign in’ and the rest should be self-explanatory. This means you can see the mailing list archives that you are subscribed to. But in the future, it will also offer other personalised services. For example, Simon Nuttall is currently working on a route planning system. We may also be able to automate more membership information this way in the future.
In the meantime, we will shortly announce the change of address to which to send discussion group postings. All the list archives will be at www.camcycle.org.uk/lists. The online archives include all previous postings: we’ve spent some time importing the many years of discussions into the new system so that nothing is lost, and all members can have access to this archive. The new facility also includes a search function. If you don’t have a computer at home, most Cambridgeshire libraries and a few other places have free internet access and some provide training.
If you would like to join or re-join the members’ discussion list, or one of the others, please just ask us by sending an e-mail to the usual address: contact@camcycle.org.uk.
Please do keep us up to date when you change your e-mail address. It’s much easier to send information to you this way, and through it we will be able to offer you more in the future.
David Earl