A few of our core members have been working hard behind the scenes recently to set up an online discussion forum for CTC.
The main reason behind this effort is to reduce the amount of daily email in your inbox which some of you have been complaining about (although the amount of email can be configured). Going forward we are planning to send only new trek invites to the Google Group and move all other discussions, member updates, etc. to a separate CTC discussion forum.
Everyone will be able to access the forum and follow and participate in all ongoing member discussions, trek experiences, feedback and some of the discussions between our organizers. The forum has a proper predefined structure which better organizes the different topics of discussion in logical categories. Based on their individual interest members will be able to subscribe (receive email) to those categories or topics of their interest only. The forum we selected allows you to still follow and participate in the discussions from withing your lazy inbox to start new topics, get email updates on topics of your interest and reply to topics without having your inbox or having to open and log in to another site. So the convenience of our current Google Group is maintained.
The online forum will enable more interaction and collaboration within our huge member base without generating unwanted email traffic to those members who prefer to receive only the upcoming trek updates. We invite you to participate more actively in the various predefined categories of interest as well as start discussions on any other topics related to trekking or CTC with your fellow members. More interaction means more knowledge sharing within our group, generation of more ideas and suggestions, basically a more active member group. As usual with any new technology or process there will a small learning curve involved for all of us to understand and get comfortable with this new online interaction forum. Our core members will be assist you with any startup issues you might face.
I suspect there would be three type of members in CTC - (1) members who will only subscribe to the new trek invites sent to our Google Group and can simply ignore this parallel discussion forum, (2) members who will visit the forum once in a while to follow the more detailed trek updates and discussions and (3) members who want to actively participate in some of the areas of interest. Only the third category will require to register themselves (email_ID,pwd) on the new forum to get posting rights. These members can also upload a small photo so you can see the person whom you are discussing with rather then some cryptic email ID. All others will not require to register or login to this forum as it is freely accessible as read-only.
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