First, I’ll introduce myself. I’ve been the webmaster for BMW RSM since about 2005. I’m on the board and my job is generally to manage anything online for the club. To date, that includes the website, two Facebook groups, a Twitter account, and the Paypal account. I make updates to the website for events, club news, rally registration, membership forms and payment, general page and feature updates, and occasional posts to the blog. I’m an administrator on the club Facebook group along with Bob Collin. I solely administrate the Rally Facebook group. In the past, I have set up and managed a forum for the club as well as a photo gallery. After a hosting server move which required some major work to update these, I removed them. They were a tremendous amount of work on a regular basis due to constant hacking attacks and were barely used over the several years they were available. The Facebook groups have replaced the forums and gallery.
I wanted to address some questions that came up in a club meeting a while back. The first was “why can’t we advertise bikes and gear on the website?” The forums were originally set up for self-posting For Sale items as well as other discussion groups. Unfortunately, they had minimal activity and the maintenance was too high to continue. Facebook groups are now the place to post bikes and gear for sale. Several months ago, I installed a feature on the website that will list the activity from the club Facebook group on the home page. There is also a Club Facebook Group page now on this site. So, ‘For Sales’ from the Facebook group can be found here.
Long ago we had a webmaster (and I did the same for a while) that diligently posted personal sale ads for members on the website. That process was a lot more work than most people would realize. It was also a major pain as people asked to be posted, asked for changes, and asked for them to be taken down. That, and the manual nature of maintaining that website is likely a good part of why that webmaster had to step down. Manually posting personal ads on the web pages is time consuming for the webmaster. So, I do not make that available on this website. As I find useful functionality to add the site for the membership (especially when self-server), I will do my best to install it.
The second question was “Can the club’s Facebook page be made public to allow anybody to go to it?“. The club Facebook pages are, for the most part, public. Users have to ‘Join’ most all Facebook groups. We require new ‘Joins’ to be approved by an admin because it is too easy for spammers to join and start hammering a group with ads. Advertising by non-members is allowed (and members) as long as it is motorcycle or club related. So, Bob and I vette anybody requesting to join to make sure they don’t look like the typical Facebook spammer. We’ve missed a few and will remove anybody violating sensible group use. Spammers and Trolls, along with anybody that tries to carry on a non-civilized conversation will disappear quickly.
If you have any questions regarding the site, drop a note through our contact form. Questions to any of the board members can be sent from the contact page. Specific Facebook questions should be posed in the Facebook group, unless you’re having trouble joining for some reason. Then, just drop me a note on the site.
Please, enjoy the site and Facebook groups that are being maintained for the club. Feel free to send your feedback, I like to know that club members are using them.