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Hello from Lancaster


Darren S

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Hello. I'm Darren. New CPS member. I've been active in other specialist plant societies for decades. Started out with alpines in the early 90s and then incorporated bulbs, cacti etc. 

My oldest CPs are a bowl of Pinguicula grandiflora that I have had since my alpines days. More recently I was promised some sarracenia divisions as part of a plant swap, so started reading up on CPs and got hooked. Last year I grew a few pygmy Drosera from gemmae. I am still waiting for the sarracenia but meanwhile have bought a few more Drosera and some terrestrial Utricularia.

I still work full time as an analytical chemist but am expecting to start a phased retirement next year by going part-time and will have more time with my plants. 

I also have a side-gig as a botanical artist, but it costs more than it earns so has been relegated to hobby status. 

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Thank you. Nice to be here. Hobbies aplenty. Time is the problem 😉

The Ping I bought from a CP stall at the Southport flower show, it must be twenty years. It was a single nose but has increased from dislodged gemmae with no help from me. The flowers are beautiful.

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, linuxman said:

Hi and welcome to the forum. Unfortunately you've joined at a time when there's little activity on here from members, especially UK ones. I'd like to hear from the CPS committee about the future of this forum, or do they want us all to be "liking" things on FB?

Thank you. This has been an issue with other hobby forums (fora?) that I have been a member of over the years.  FB and I will never happen so if that is the case then I will disappear😂

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Hi folks

For what it's worth, we're still here 😉

It's not hugely visible but we've actually put quite a bit of work into the forum this year behind the scenes. We've moved it to new self-managed hosting to reduce ongoing costs and we've been through a fairly time-consuming effort to bring it through a series of upgrades as it had fallen some way behind the latest version of the forum software. We've also made improvements to the database, fixed various UI issues such as broken mobile views where text overlapped all over the place, and tightened up security to reduce spam posts.

During the same period we've completely overhauled the main website including a new system to manage the seedbank and make the listings more informative and more up-to-date.

There's a stack of further work we'd like to do over the coming year to improve the Society's online presence, some of which ties in with the forum. On the technical side, I'd like to review the forum theme to integrate it better with the design of the website, create more interconnections between the website content and the forum, and look at revising the member ranking / badges etc. to give Society members (who are contributing to its upkeep through their membership) recognition in the forum.

Content wise we're keen to share engaging and informative material across all our channels. The reality is that the big social media platforms are more widely used and in many ways more accessible to the general public than traditional Web forums. So yes, we will put stuff onto those channels - not just Facebook, but also Instagram and Twitter (if it's still there 😅) - where it's easy to engage people with the charity. But we'll also try to be more consistent in sharing things here too; that's a fair criticism.

A general concern for me personally is how we convert engagement online into actual memberships of the Society. We have 850+ group members on the private Facebook group but probably fewer than a third of those have joined the CPS itself. We have over 4000 forum members here (a few hundred active) but a tiny minority of those are Society members, and some of those who are most active here as sellers, for example, haven't ever joined the Society as far as I can tell.

It's obviously not realistic to expect everyone - or even most people - we engage online to sign up as a paying member, and there are probably lots of reasons why people might not have felt like joining or staying in the CPS in recent years. As a committee we're doing our best to nudge things along in the right direction and hopefully over time you'll see the results of that.

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I’m not a Facebook type of social media fan and as the original poster has said, like a lot of the forums i frequent they have slowed to maybe one post per week or completely disappeared due to Facebook

Edited by pirks
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