This made me laugh#

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:56:01 +0000

If you're not in London I probably need to start with a bit of context. There's a weekly email thing called the "FNS Dispatch", which has some selection of skating-related news in it, mostly notices of new Citiskate courses (Citiskate are one of the skate schools here in town), but it also has news of where the LFNS and Stroll are going each week. Great, free publicity for us.

Minor wrinkle: for more information on either of the said events it refers people to web sites run by Citiskate, instead of the www.lfns.co.uk site that the volunteer skate marshals put together. This is an issue insofar as it makes the whole thing look like a Citiskate event - it used to be (in fact, all credit to them, the skates were founded by the same people as run Citiskate and up to about a year ago we were sponsored by them) but that's no longer the case. So it's a bit of a sore point that they won't acknowledge anything we've done in 2006, but we've asked them to change, for whatever reason they haven't, and there's a point where you decide that further effort just for the sake of "getting the credit" would be petty and a waste of time. Especially as it's still free publicity and it helps get people out on the skates, which is the main thing.

Cutting to the chase: this week apparently it says

We received a few emails last week on the status on the FNS website which didn't update to show the skate was cancelled. Our apologies; note that official routes are published on thefns.com and rollerstroll.com and any other site claiming to organise or hold the trademark to the FNS name or similar are mistaken.

and this is the bit that makes me laugh: the site that didn't update was thefns.com. The site that did update was the allegedly unofficial www.lfns.co.uk. Why did this happen and how do I know? Because I was Lead Marshal on last weeks' LFNS, and it was me that updated it. I designed the route, based on my usual post-Vic route home and some roads I found [[last month=>Lost Bearings]], I checked the route on Tuesday, along with about 20 people who came along the ride, and at, oh, 17:05 on Friday, I cancelled the skate because the weather forecast looked rubbish. The first thing I did was to update the web site we run at www.lfns.co.uk - I even went back to the server logs when I read that email, just to make sure I wasn't mistaken, but my IP address is there in black and white electrons. After that I posted on the sekrit marshal forum (called redlocker, there's a story behind that name) we use for co-ordinating stuff from week to week, and on the serpentineroad forum where general London skating discussion goes on. I didn't try to get anything on the Citiskate-owned site because - well, actually, because I'd forgotten all about its existence. If I had stopped to think about it I'd assume they'd update it themselves as usual.

So, I don't know what basis they have to claim that the site they cite is "official", but it's certainly not due to its links with the decision makers (and it's not funding either, cos we've had no money from them for the past year). And even supposing there is some definition of the word that means "run by people we had a bit of a falling out with over a year ago", exactly how relevant is it anyway as a criterion for choosing where to browse? I'd go with "more accurate" every time.