New member

[Graham Wright]

I joined this Google Forum today, mainly to support Wayne Power who
has created a really great website for our club.
However I am very dubious about the value of these forums, also known
as bulletin boards or discussion groups. I have participated in
several in past years, only to find them to be almost no help in
actually learning anything useful. For a start, the use of nicknames
puts me off completely, because I prefer to know who I am
communicating with. Of couse some people can discover to whom the
nicknames belong, by closely monitoring their contributions.
Meanwhile others like me will have no idea who they are. This
degrades the whole basis of good communication in my opinion. My
other objection is that it is quite difficult to ask really good
questions and it is even more difficult to give substantial anwers in
a few minutes of typing while online.
I hope I am wrong - only time will tell how effective our forum will
be.
For those who have never participated in an online forum before, the
SNEB forum may well be a safe and friendly place to start, so please
do not be put off by my cynicism!
Best wishes to Wayne - I really hope the forum will be successful.
Graham Wright

[Wayne]

Thanks Graham and welcome aboard. Looking forward to more of your
direct, no nonsense style! Don't forget that you can compose your
messages in depth, off -line, in (say) Notepad and then just cut and
paste the result into these boxes. But some answers are, indeed, as
short and simple as many of the questions - such as your recent one
about printing the grid pattern using Excel. Before this forum, you
had to put it in an email to Eddie, who then formatted it into Word
for the email newsletter, then converted it to PDF, then emailed it
out only to those on his list. Then I read it, converted it to HTML
and finally added it to the website. This forum would have provided a
much more direct way for you to essentially say - "Tick the
Gridlines!".

But, in any case, there are all the other possibilities I mentioned -
bargain alerts, interesting links, genealogy sites, reviews, ideas,
opinions, etc that we Seniors living in the Eastern Suburbs can all
contribute. Nicknames are partly a protection against spam and mad
hackers, so I wouldn't worry to much there either.

Anyway - the important stuff: Are the All Blacks really going to win
the World Cup or will the Springboks or the Wallabies beat us again??
Some even reckon the French might have recovered from being mauled by
the Pumas to make it all the way back!

Regards,
Wayne