Mike, Limpy and Clare go to The Lodge to talk about the Community.

On Friday 6th June we arrived at The Lodge - it was a beautiful day:

On arriving in the reception area we met Mike, Mrs T and Maurice Tse-Laurence - once we were signed in we headed for a quiet spot in the garden to chat about the Community and some of the problems.  The excellent Mrs T (Claire) had come equipped with a note pad and pen (thankfully, as we hadn't) and we put some of our points and questions to Claire and Maurice:

We learned one thing affecting the site speed considerably is at certain times of day the site sends out news to people who have subscribed to that service - the chances are that when the site slows right down it is trying to cope with running the Community and sending out news at the same time.

The Community is, to a degree, a victim of its own success - when it was first started the RSPB genuinely had no inkling of how many people would take to it, and the reality took them by surprise.  They were delighted at the level of success but have struggled to keep up with the sheer amount of information to appear.  We suggested they needed to make more use of the Community as we think it is a perfect way to show off the RSPB and its work.

We discussed archiving as a way to potentially create more space for newer posts and photos - Mike commented that Rutland Water had successfully done this with its older blogs - the main concern was how much to archive, and where to put the archived material.  It was also suggested that past post of users who no longer post on the Community might be archived.  We also expressed a wish that the archived material should be accessible in some way.  Claire and Maurice said they would look into this.

We brought up the recent survey which appeared on the Technical Difficulties thread - happily, Maurice had already tweaked this so you can tell it what problem is being experienced.  We have personally found it useful.

Glitches like posts and threads disappearing and reappearing, missing reply buttons, rich formatting and error messages are all being looked into - we are awaiting a response.

As to communication levels - the problem is that there aren't too many people at the head office to regularly post on the threads, which leaves teams like IT having to choose between sorting the problems or talking to us.

We also brought up the subject of Good Egg Awards - Claire and Maurice couldn't think of any good reason these had been stopped and they both felt that special posts should be recognised.  We look forward to hearing to a response on that one.

Finally we raised the dreaded question of whether the Community will continue to exist as part of the RSPB's website.  The impression we were given was that both Claire and Maurice were in favour of the Community continuing but we were not given a definite yes or no answer.  I think it's possible that this is being discussed at a higher level.

At this point I would like to give our sincere thanks to Claire and Maurice for making time to meet us all to discuss our points - they are clearly very busy so it was very much appreciated by the three of us!  We would also like to congratulate Claire on her well-deserved promotion.  Clare (my wife) and I would also like to thank Mike for joining us - he actually stayed overnight in the area so he could accompany us.  His input  was most valuable and very appreciated.

We will follow this up in the future as and when more answers appear.

We did take a while to have a quick look at this very beautiful reserve - poor Limpy was tired out by then and needed a lift: