Canada - Soaring Association of Canada has its own forums now

I looked for an announcement on www.sac.ca but did not find one.

I hope it is OK if I make you people aware here, I recall we had people from all around the world in the old Roundtable forums. I am not a SAC person, so get in touch with your Zone Director for questions.

If you are a SAC member, and if you (or your club) gave them your current email address recently, you will likely have received an email about the new moderated forums at : http://www1.sac.ca/forum/index.php

They chose a pre-subscribed model, unless they set you up in advance with a User ID of lastname.firstname and a password, you will not be able to participate. So, if you are a member or a lifetime member you can log in, change your password to whatever you like and participate. If you are not a SAC member you can join and request access.

The initial window is in one half of Canada's official languages. As you may know, French is also legally used in the air by pilots here so we all can read enough French to get by. Once you log in though, boiler plate forum text switches to your preferred language.

My role was moderator of the old forums established and maintained for free by Andre Lepage on his own company's servers. The old forums had a software failure after Andre sold his ISP business, and the history of posts cannot be retrieved easily if at all. I have always been quite vocal on certain issues in the old forums, but I used the same rules for moderating myself as I did for all other people... I never deleted anyone's posts. I hope one day the old archives can be recovered.

There will be a majority of people wanting to avoid contentious issues so the new forums will serve SAC well.

For those whose SAC membership has lapsed, or for those whose club made SAC membership optional, I will keep the "Soaring Canada Forums" up as long as they are useful to anyone. They only took an hour to create, they are unilingual and I did not have to contend with an interface to a SAC membership register and respond when a member leaves or a new one joins.

I promise to keep my ranting to the separate sub-forum where you have to go look for negative comments.

There are still other people, though, who prefer a forum where I do not even appear.

For that purpose I created a separate domain name "SACRoundtable.ca" meaning "Soaring Associates of Canada" not to be confused with the Association. A direct link is http://www.sacroundtable.ca/roundtable/

Here you can choose to register and take up matters with like minded people..

So, lots of choices for various people. I will delete the two I created based on what people decide to do. Over time, it will be obvious which approach people prefer.