I've been thinking about this section of the forum for a while and I feel it is time to make some changes to it. It is mostly a hang-over of history that we still maintain a partially private area of the forum. Most of the members in it got grandfathered in when we had various forum changes many years ago.
I think the forum overall would now be better served if we merge the three sections here - Cafe Area, Members Diaries and The Sofa into the main forum. This will make the posts in them publicly visible. At the moment thread titles can be seen by all users but not the content and in reality, that is only private to the sum of 99p and a copy and paste operation. I feel splitting content between visible and non-visible sections doesn't help the forum and valuable content is lost to some people.
I do understand if some members wish to remove content they have posted in these three sections and to aid that I will enable members to delete their own content in these sections up to the point we finally merge them into the main forum.
There are a few members who pay for access to these sections. If you've paid for a year and would like a pro-rata refund at the time of merging please let me know and I'll sort that out. Otherwise the subscription will be gratefully used for the ongoing server costs.
I've set a date of 01/07/2020 for the merge to happen so that gives nearly 2 months for any editing or deletion of posts you may want to do.
Please do consider if you do delete a post and that destroys the flow of a thread, perhaps a few edits would suffice instead?
I think the forum overall would now be better served if we merge the three sections here - Cafe Area, Members Diaries and The Sofa into the main forum. This will make the posts in them publicly visible. At the moment thread titles can be seen by all users but not the content and in reality, that is only private to the sum of 99p and a copy and paste operation. I feel splitting content between visible and non-visible sections doesn't help the forum and valuable content is lost to some people.
I do understand if some members wish to remove content they have posted in these three sections and to aid that I will enable members to delete their own content in these sections up to the point we finally merge them into the main forum.
There are a few members who pay for access to these sections. If you've paid for a year and would like a pro-rata refund at the time of merging please let me know and I'll sort that out. Otherwise the subscription will be gratefully used for the ongoing server costs.
I've set a date of 01/07/2020 for the merge to happen so that gives nearly 2 months for any editing or deletion of posts you may want to do.
Please do consider if you do delete a post and that destroys the flow of a thread, perhaps a few edits would suffice instead?