New Skywaves Forum Goes Live!

After several weeks of construction and testing, the brand new Skywaves bulletin board has gone public! This marks a major milestone in the history of the group. Click on the image to visit.

The new look Forum of the Skywaves DX Group

"Skywaves" began life as the monthly DX publication of the British FM & TV Circle in October 1995. In 2000, Skywaves dropped the magazine and became an online internet forum with Yahoo Groups.

At the beginning of 2014, Yahoo Groups downgraded their system and took on the "Neo"platform, which had many problems for almost all of the membership.

After a lot of discussion and testing behind the scenes, it was agreed that a new platform should be trialed. Some members maintained that the existing Yahoo Neo Group should be continued, at least for the time being.

We cannot guarantee the reliability of the service from Yahoo and so we expect that the new bulletin board will ultimately replace it, after which time the Yahoo Group will be locked but still hopefully used for its archives.

We hope all our members take the time to give the new board a try. It offers so much more than a mailing list,and you can still opt to receive email alerts. Here is a brief rundown on the new Skywaves bulletin board which we hope will dispel some of the concerns raised.

Notes:
The new Skywaves forum is hosted privately and does not take any form of advertising. All member's email addresses are hidden. We have also removed some aspects of the gimmicky side of bulletin boards.

Security is paramount in the new forum. We have developed our own personally styled "Captcha" registration images which you have to get past on the registration page. I use the words get past because these registration tests are supposed to be difficult in order to prevent spam bots registering and these have been 100% successful since their implementation, but please contact the group Admin or moderators if you have any problems with the registration process.

Member's first posts will automatically enter a moderation queue, thus further ensuring that only only genuine radio-related posts get through.

You can subscribe to individual posts, topics (threads) and entire sub-forums as you choose. This will send a notification via the email address you signed up with, which also includes a link to the post itself and a separate link to the forum.

The only thing you cannot in the new bulletin board system is reply to the notifications, but you can go to the posts directly by clicking on the link. Furthermore, there is no need for any extra clicks or logins, providing you have logged in at least once before and have ticked the "keep me logged in" box. Our members were concerned there would be lots of messing around involved in reaching the posts. This will not be the case.

We regret that we can not simply transfer your memberships across as these are two different platforms.

As with all new things, there may be some teething problems, so please bear with us if so. The forum will evolve and adapt to membership needs. We welcome your comments and ideas.

There is an FAQ section at the top right which should answer most of your questions, otherwise please ask if there is anything which is not covered.

The new site was constructed by myself, but it wouldn't have been possible without the technical know-how of Lynton Towler. Special thanks also go to Jim Smith, Andrew Webster and Nick Gilly for testing the new forum over the last few weeks. Julian Hardstone and and Günter Lorenz are still at the helm and share Group Ownership. Apologies if I have forgotten anybody there.

We hope you will enjoy the new look Skywaves.