Thanks for the suggestion, Grant. This was a Fathom project, and because the parameters of their cleanup work are to provide functionality at least equivalent to the old site the options you would like would be an extra-cost enhancement. We are avoiding those wherever possible. Eventually our IT staff will be able to make changes of this kind but they’re working down an established priority list right now. We do plan to implement – I hope in a matter of weeks, not months – a “report generator” to output from our various databases (including clubs) in a variety of formats, including CSV.

Clubs are moved from active to inactive if they fail to file an annual report two years in a row. We send them reminders, but maintaining contact with the clubs and specifically, getting them to file annual reports is a responsibility of the Affiliated Club Coordinator. The “big-club-list” tool was designed mainly to help the ACCs and SMs do their jobs.

Who to name as their contact person is a club decision.

To kill two birds with one stone, to answer Brian’s question here is a description of the club update process works. When logged in, any ARRL member who is viewing a club page will see a small “Edit” button in the upper right. If they click on that they will then see a page where that club’s information can be edited. A submission from this page doesn’t directly result in an update but generates a message to staff that is used to perform the update. The submitter is told that it may take up to three days for the update to appear on the site.

In my October 29 report on Web status I mentioned that Web-to-Siebel data communication issues – that is, the two getting out of sync – were the cause of some of our problems. Without knowing details I can’t say for sure but that may have been the cause of the Albuquerque DX Association issue. The club data was resynced yesterday after Jon Bloom fixed a bug, and whether because of that or for some other reason I see that the club’s record was updated earlier today.

73,

Dave K1ZZ

From: Grant Hopper [mailto:ghopper@eskimo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 3:53 PM
To: arrl-odv
Subject: RE: Section club list is live

This is going to be a HANDY tool!  A hardy THANK YOU to the staff for rolling this out.

I'd ask for one more sort option (I guess it's a search option with a sort order.) Rather than doing two searches, one for active clubs and another for inactive ones,  I'd love an option that allows me to have both on one list and have them flagged (in each record) as inactive (or as active, or both.)  After that, being able to sort by active/inactive would be nice.  Actually, while I'm wishing, having the ability to sort on two fields would be awesome!  An example of this might be to sort by Active/Inactive, and then by city to see how many clubs are in a city and how many of those are 'inactive' with the idea of seeing if a population was under served or over served as an explanation of why the clubs died off, or need some support to get more active.

The only other data I'd love to have is the date that the club listing was last "active" for the inactive clubs (as opposed to the last update date), and a note about why it went 'inactive' if known.  An option to dump to a comma delimited text file so I can do further sorting or searching would be nice too, but I suspect that's more messing than the above requests are.

73,

Grant

KB7WSD

Also, in doing some searches, I noticed several clubs that actually use the call of the club president or contact person.  This doesn't seem like a good (or sensible) practice.  Any thoughts on this?

 -----Original Message-----
From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ [mailto:dsumner@arrl.org]
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:08 PM
To: arrl-odv
Subject: Section club list is live

It is now possible to get a list of the ARRL affiliated clubs in a section, with detailed information and sorted in several different ways, directly from the Web site. The information can be displayed in three different ways: on the screen, as a list of hyperlinks, and as a PDF. The list of hyperlinks is a very useful way to go directly to the information on a specific club.

If you go to www.arrl.org/big-club-list you will see the search screen. It is labeled BETA; we are not aware of any bugs but don’t want to remove the label until more people have had a chance to use it. Please feel free to play with and let me know of any problems you encounter.

This is a big step toward giving back to the section leadership the tools they need, but we know there is more work to do.

Barring something unexpected (i.e. a glaring problem we haven’t yet detected) we’ll extend the same invitation to SMs before the end of the week.

73,

Dave K1ZZ