As the fees we have to pay for forum hosting are dependent upon the number of registered members and access to all the material posted is in any case open-access, we decided some time ago to remove from membership anyone who does not log in a) within one month of initial registration or b) for six consecutive months.

This was all set out in the members only Administrative Notices section of the forum. (See here)

Unfortunately, once a member has been deleted their old posts cannot be linked to their new user name.

Yes, sorry about that Kay but look on the bright side.

As a new member, you're now so much younger than an early 2014 member is

Welcome back. it's so good to hear from you again

Randa

Hi Kay, when Folk log in we don't necessarily expect them to say anything. Just by logging in will keep your membership up to date.

I'm sure you can appreciate that we have a huge number of membership requests annually and many of them only visit once or twice for a nose before abandoning us. If we didn't introduce this 1 month / 6 month rule, this forum would now be about 3000 strong, most of whom will never keep their membership up to date thus costing us several hundred pounds a year in additional hosting fees.

As Aaron Calder has pointed out, any member will immediately be reinstated if their membership has lapsed. Unfortunately, the forum administration cannot link existing posts to their reinstated user name. Likewise, if a member loses their Password, we can accept a new membership request but cannot re-establish the old links as we have no way of recovering old passwords.

We try to encourage Eribafolk Facebook users to join the forum as well as this website has an excellent search facility but you are correct when you say that you have to be on here to use it.

Randa