Ringing Forums

You are not alone and it is frustrating!
As a district secretary I also have the task of asking tower contacts to confirm their details and tell me if details need to change each year. This can be surprisingly difficult with a small proportion of tower contacts so I can see why we end up with out dated information or lack of response from some towers across the country.
If you wanted some data on it you could ask the Dove team as they have been emailing lots of tower contacts about bell information so may have (or could start to collate) the proportion where they don’t get a reply or are told ‘I haven’t been ringing for years who need to contact X’.
Often this is the same contact for learning to ring at a tower so it doesn’t help our recruitment if we don’t have a responsive contact available for people.

Coincidentally, i am just in the process of updating all the tower contacts for the Leicester Guild. As we haven't had a Guild report since before covid, a lot of our information is out of date, and its a huge task to update it. I've had to learn how to mail merge from spreadsheets(!), although the alternative would be to email all of the towers individually. Thankfully District secretaries have been a huge help in asking their tower contacts to fill in the online form for me, but as we have some districts without secretaries I'm now having to mop up the rest myself. Hopefully once I have email addresses for the majority of towers I shall be able to automate the system so I can send out an email each year for people to make sure the data is up to date. I am beginning to think that for some towers we will just have to put "information not held by the guild" for the contact details.
As the webmaster I often get messaged by people who sent an email via our website but haven't had a reply - most of the time the email got through ok, but the recipient hasn't replied. It isn't always the technology that is broken.

It's not a new problem, of course. Organising tours fifty years ago, usually for visits from a canal boat, needed a first-draft timetable of towers within walking distance of the canal, then a visit to the library to consult Crockford's (Clerical directory) for the name and address of the vicar, then a polite handwritten letter enclosing a stamped-addressed envelope. It was usually an efficient system. I remember replanning one day to cope with a non-existent response, and two months later receiving a reply from South Africa to where the vicar had retired a couple of years before. Amendment to system: add "or incumbent" to the vicar's name on the envelope ...

Another efficient system was to telephone the tower contact mentioned in the Guild report, avoiding practice night for the call: that gave an good indication on whether the request would be looked-on favourably, and then promising to call-back a week later when all the necessary people had been consulted. If the tower-contact had changed, then there was probably a warm trail to the current officer. I suspect this system of speaking-with-real-people, rather than messaging them, is still the best bet ...

... but if we want to make the best of smartphones I suspect that WhatsApp is the best modern method, with integrated textmessages, photos of participants and voice calls.

Otoh, we recently had a Tower Correspondent who declined to have their postal or email address or landline or mobile number published anywhere, for fear of online nastiness ... Hmmmm ....

we recently had a Tower Correspondent who declined to have their postal or email address or landline or mobile number published anywhere — PeterScott

I wonder what he/she thought the word 'correspondent' meant.

Picking up Peter Scott's last point about incommunicative correspondents, I have come to the conclusion that the risk of scam, malicious or junk phone calls is seriously over-egged. During the 35 years I served as a magistrate my phone number continued to be listed in the phone book and during that time I received only one unpleasant phone call. For the last 50+ years my address and phone number has been visible on a small sign at the external tower door and - touch wood - I have yet to receive a single unwanted phone call or visit.

Until this week, the church website that I manage has included the name, mobile number and email address of all the 'public facing' church officials and leaders of the several church groups. Communication was easy. (And for the avoidance of doubt, each contact had previously agreed to their details being published). This week, an edict 'from on high' required me to remove all the contact details and require that all communications are made via the generic Contact Form which will all land in the Vicar's in-box. I hope that this not the kiss of death to the messages and that our incumbent can cope with them all.

I sympathise with people who have been the subject of unwanted / malicious calls etc through having their contact details published, but we now live in a Society where, perhaps, we need to accept some irritations as the price we pay for the wonderful communications systems we now have. I prepared a broadsheet-style handout about my home tower's bells some5 years ago which gets updated every so often. Its handed out / left in Church / distributed amongst some local neighbour businesses etc and it includes my contact details. Yes, I do get occasional junk mail and nuisance calls / spam but these have all been of an ilk that "everyone" now gets. I've received nothing untoward from the hundreds of paper copies of my newsletter that are "out there". Peter Southeran's experience / observations match mine and, I suspect, almost everyone else's.

Websites have always suffered from being out of date the moment after they are published, I have seen some where a date is added to the contact details after which time the information should be considered “stale” in the case of a TC this could be the next APCM date, this is then an update to be made by the person in charge of the site. In defence of the “contact form” this is a simple method of quickly updating where a request goes to, and it is usually a relatively simple process to add some logic to get it to multiple or different recipients .. but there is no silver bullet for this one I am afraid as humans are involved !!

Websites have always suffered from being out of date the moment after they are publishe — Steve Farmer

Any more than printed reports?

no, but a report as a snapshot in time is a known annual (or other!) event, clearly marked and understood whereas a website can updated at random intervals (or not) so there is no basis on which the average reader can make an educated guess as to whether the data is current ..

agreed people know that a report is printed once a year whereas a website may be updated much more (or occasionally less) often, but in both cases there is no indication of whether a particular item has changed since then.
The difference is that if the information had changed since then a report will definitely be wrong whereas a website will probably be correct (but not guaranteed).
Most people are conscientious, and a website enables them to keep information up to date. A few are not conscientious, but don't blame that on the communication medium.
A good website will tell you when it was last updated. That doesn't guarantee everything on it will be correct but it's a good indication of how 'live' it is.

exactly my point, however as usual you put it more eloquently! I do however have some reservations on the number of websites that add a “published” or “valid until” date on a section of contact information.

I didn't say a lot of websites have an updated indicator, I said that a good one will. I suppose commercial websites don't have an incentive to do that, but I would have thought 'community' websites, like ringing ones, do because it gives confidence that they are being maintained. . The sites I manage all say when the site was updated on the home page, and most other pages include an automatically generated date. It's not rocket science.

Agreed :-)

The date shown on a website may be a copyright claim, and generated automatically each time it is downloaded. Examining the HTML may help sometimes.

I update our tower website every few weeks. The front page contains a link to our latest news which is dated. https://gransdenbells.org/

I suspect that it maybe when information like a tower correspondent is updated, those responsible for updating that information may not even know all the places where it is published online. I look after a little social media empire (never tell anyone who doesn’t need to know that you are retiring :wink: ) and my motto is wrong information is worse than no information.

I too am wary of putting personal information online. If you put your name, address, email, phone number and birthday in the public domain I suspect those who commit online crime, identity theft, fraud etc. will be delighted. The contact form seems the best compromise.

I too am wary of putting personal information online. If you put your name, address, email, phone number and birthday in the public domain I suspect those who commit online crime, identity theft, fraud etc. will be delighted — Alan C

Yes, but that's not a reason to be fearful of putting anything online. The aim should be to provide what is useful for communication. For officers our branch website shows photo, name, generic email and phone number and for tower correspondents it shows generic email and phone number. The personal information is subject to consent but hardly anyone opts out.

Yes, but that's not a reason to be fearful of putting anything online. — John Harrison

I fear we’ll have to disagree on that point.

Information Commisioner’s Office advice