a little downtrodden

A new RASC Toronto Centre member sent out a complaint missive.

Said he was confused about when meetings would occur. Found a note on the web site (but didn't say where, exactly, or provide a link) which said meetings occur on the first and third Wednesday's in a month. I've looked and looked and I cannot find this remark. That's not to say it's not there. But if I can't find it, he must have really been digging.

Then he bemoaned that he couldn't plan his life without knowing when the meetings would be out to June. He said only January meetings were listed. Not true. He didn't seem to discover the February calendar was complete with some content in March. Admittedly, I have not posted all the events in the web site calendar. Partly because it's a pain in the ass! And partly because some of these events are tentative.

Guy backed me up. Pointed out we're dependent on the Ontario Science Centre. And we're waiting for some confirmations.

This also made me wonder, since he said he's been a member since September, if he saw my email bulletin to the group, issued on December 11, that January dates were up but that we'd post more events as they were confirmed... Clearly he didn't get or read that message.

Finally, he bellyached that he couldn't email anyone because the links on the contact page didn't work. This revealed that he had not closely read this page. Maybe he was tired, at this stage, after his exhaustive search of our site for deeply buried meeting information. I sent out a general message reminding members that because of spam attacks we did not show our full email addresses and we did not provide them as hyperlinks. A user would have to manually construct it. Sorry. That's the way it goes.

Katrina also ran block here saying that he could have simply replied to Paul via the Yahoo!Group email message, replied directly, avoiding a long and laborious search.

Wait a minute. What about SCOPE? If he's been getting the newsletter, lots of info, and email addresses, in there...

All this left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. We're trying. We're trying to make the web site usable, we're trying to plan out activities for the year, we're trying to make being in the Centre fun. We try to cover the bases: info on the web; info in your electronic inbox; maybe even paper form. But then we get people passively-aggressively bashing members, slamming the web site, all without reading the date-stamps on articles, reading the opening remarks, webmaster notes, checking their newsletter, while being calm, and recalling we're all volunteers here.

Enjoy the snow.

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Hmmm. Maybe I should recruit him to edit the site!

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Was this Dave Cotterell?!