www.escouts.org.uk

By Austin Lill

As someone who still marvels at the internet it’s no surprise to learn that I usually plump for sites of value and with my ACSL hat on I love the fact that cyberspace is usually one giant free resource.

One that I find I visit above all else is the excellent escouts.org.uk which is a Scouting forum, free hosting and social group site. Having made such a statement you’ll be thinking ‘This Escouts site had better be pretty darned good-it is-let me expand on this…

Actually, let me expand with a little help. I’m a regular user who wants to write a promotional piece on the site to go beyond word of mouth . It’s doing okay thank you with a thousand unique visitors a day and over ten thousand visitors in total but a little promotion wouldn’t hurt to a receptive audience.

Allow me to introduce the thoughts of Richard Fairbairn, who founded the site eight years ago but by his own admission couldn’t do it on his own, and Gavin Holt who is a member of the team.

So what’s in it for you, the Scouter? Do you need free hosting for your Scout website? Indeed, do you need to find someone to help build the website? Do you want to chew the Scouting fat on a forum as opposed to a newsgroup? Do you have a burning PC/ web question? Do you have a subject that you’d like to make a social group out of to chat to the like minded?

You may answer yes to some of them, but Escouts answers yes to all of them! Such a fine site must be part of the Scout Association’s set up surely? Nope, and both Richard and Gavin are proud to be independent pointing out the freedom this brings to talk from the heart about Scouting on the moderated forum and as Richard says ‘it is a incredibly well behaved forum, but then again we are Scouts!!’.

Richard thinks the forum is at the site’s core and it was the first of it’s kind, but it’s the free Scout website hosting is an important unique selling point too. Their server currently manages around 500 or so sites to help spread the word and although I’ve not used this feature Richard says it’s as easy as clicking a link and reading the terms and conditions. In addition to Richard and Gavin, in the Escouts Team; Jonathan Bloor, Dave Field, Daniel Haigh and Richard Willars also support the web hosting, as well as websites.

Gavin described the site as a living thing and it is always being developed. The latest addition is the social groups. There’s everything from Bushcraft to Blackberry user groups and it allows chatter to kindered spirits in a fill your boots kind of way!

I could go on but I’ll finish with how Richard and Gavin summed the site up in one word, they answered ‘Useful’ and ‘Community’. Good answers, log in and decide for yourself at www.escouts.org.uk.