This forum hasn’t been used much and I think we need to open it up to make it a more useful tool that can be used by members, non-member clients and potential clients to communicate.
Currently this forum is only open to members of Webarchitects, the process by which we have been managing this is to whitelist the domains of members organisations and create webarch.coop email aliases for individual members and only allow account account creation using these domains.
I’d like to propose changing this so that the whitelist is used to automatically add user account to a new Webarchitects group (and update users icons so they have an overlaid logo to make it clear) and then to create some member-only categories (some could be private and only open to members) and make some other changes so that members automatically have a high trust level etc.
Then we can open the forum up to sign-ups from everyone, this shouldn’t be a problem in terms of spam as we have been running the CoTech forum as an open forum for a few years and there hasn’t been a problem there.
As part of this re-organisation I think we should change the domain name to something shorter, for example forum.webarch.coop.
Please post any thoughts above this below and I’ll put it on the agenda for our (currently weekly) Management Commitee meeting on Wednesday 6th May.