I’ve made some changes to make group memberships simpler and easier to use.

1. I’ve removed the My Groups page. Joining and leaving groups is now done on the groups’ pages themselves using the “join this group” and “leave this group” buttons.

Bear in mind that if you’re an editor or administrator of a group and you leave it, you’ll lose that status if you rejoin. You’ll have to ask me or the group’s administrator to restore your old status.

2. You can no longer be a “private” member of a group. All the old private memberships have been deleted. If you were a private member of a group, you’re not a member of that group at all now. Not having a private/public status for membership simplifies things. All memberships are now public.

Sutton Active has taken its first step towards making all of its information available under a licence that lets anyone use and republish it freely.

All new events added to the calendar must allow republication according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. This gives Sutton Active and everyone else the right to
use, modify, distribute and republish the event information so long as two conditions are met:

• Attribution — you must give credit to the original contributors and Sutton Active
• Share Alike — you are free to modify the information and republish it so long as your modifications are also published under the same licence.

Using this licence will make it possible for other people to use this information in ways that suits them. They might publish it on their own website or in a newsletter, add it to their organisation’s intranet calendar, or who knows?

And really, that’s the point. I don’t know how people might want to use this information but I do want them to have the right to do so. And now they have.

If you have any questions about licencing issues please contact me and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I’ve made it much easier to add events to the calendar. You no longer need to be an administrator or editor of a group to add an event for that group — so there’s no need to ask permission to be “promoted” before you can put things in the calendar for a group.

This comes with one “catch” though. If you’re not an administrator or editor for the group organising the event you’re adding, the group will receive an email from you telling them that you’ve added an event. If they want to contact you about this, they just have to reply to the email.

I hope this will make life easier for people. If you want to add an event, just register (if you haven’t already), login and do it.

I’ve created new printable layouts across the whole site, so no matter which page you want to print you’ll get clean output without any unnecessary clutter. In many cases this will reduce the number of pages printed when you go to print — a saving for your pocket and the environment.

There are times when nothing less than a piece of paper will do, so I hope everyone will enjoy the new layouts. But remember — think before you print. Paper doesn’t grow on trees.

Sutton Active has a new home page. The redesign focuses on the two most frequently-changing things on the site: events and news items.

The events column on the left has been restyled to be a great deal clearer and easier to read. The event date is featured in a beigey-yellow calendar-style box which is also replicated larger on the individual event pages. I’ll be using this style for event listings across the whole site so they’re instantly recognisable.

New to the home page is the news column on the right. News items (culled from our member groups’ RSS and Atom feeds) have only been on Sutton Active for a week but it’s already time to give them due prominence. This is a great opportunity for groups to get their news in front of a wider audience. Publish to your own site/blog and your item will automatically be shown on Sutton Active’s home page for the next few days.

Out goes the section listing the latest groups to be added to the site. This didn’t change very often and I felt that having this on the home page gave it undue prominence. The feature has now disappeared completely, but it might make a resurgence in the groups section when I redesign that.

I hope the new home page will give a useful instant snapshot of what’s going on in Sutton and make it very clear to new visitors what Sutton Active is all about.

Until the next redesign…

I’ve split up the old Politics and Campaigns category into two separate categories: Politics and Campaigns. On reflection these two sets of groups don’t really cohabit very well. While many of the campaigns have a political element they are generally vehemently non-party-political.

Now we’ve got the new news pages up and running I expect readers will be more keen just to read the news from the categories that interest them, so separating these two sets of groups out makes even more sense.

I’ve added a helpful message to the bottom of the Campaigns category page (which remains at the original URL) to help people looking for politics groups find them on the new category page.

The new news pages on Sutton Active make it much easier to stay up to date with what local groups are doing.

Sutton Active News is automatically updated with news items from groups in the borough almost as soon as they’re published. This makes it easy for you to get an overview of what’s going on without having to visit numerous different websites.

The news pages are organised in categories, so if you’re just interested in the Politics and Campaigns News you can get that all in one place.

The more technically-minded members of Sutton Active will already be doing something similar using an RSS feed reader, but putting this facility into Sutton Active means everyone can now easily read the news in this way without having to set it up for themselves.

Stay tuned for more great features that make it even easier for Sutton’s groups to publicise what they’re doing and for Sutton residents to stay informed.

(Want your group’s news on Sutton Active? You’ll need a blog website (eg. from WordPress.com or Blogger) or a blog/content management system on your own website that produces an RSS or Atom feed. Just send me the feed’s URL and I’ll do the rest. If you’re still in the dark about this, get in touch anyway and I’ll sort it out.)

The innovation is coming thick and fast at Sutton Active. We’ll be celebrating our sixth anniversary online soon so I thought it was high time to allow people to change their passwords themselves when they’ve forgotten them rather than emailing me to do it for them.

So, no more waiting hours, days or even weeks (sorry!) for me to get around to creating you a new password. Just go to the forgotten password page and do it yourself.

As before, there’s no way of getting your old password back. If you’ve forgotten it, just create a new one (and it doesn’t matter if coincidentally it’s the same as the old one).

People sometimes ask, “Why can’t you get my old password back? Surely you must know what it is otherwise you wouldn’t know if I’d got it right when I sign in.”. It’s a good question, so if you’re interested in the technical details, read on.

All of Sutton Active’s data, including your membership info, is stored in a database. When you join the site for the first time or if you change your password, we don’t store your password in the database. Instead, we run it through a one-way mathematical process called a hashing function to turn it into a very big number that looks like gobbledegook, and then we store that big number in the database.

So if you choose the password “banana”, the hashing function turns it into 250e77f12a5ab6972a0895d290c4792f0a326ea8. That’s what we store in the database in your member record. The hashing function is called SHA1 and the number is written as hexadecimal, or base 16 rather than the usual base 10. The password you chose is simply forgotten about - we don’t store it anywhere.

How do we check your password when you sign in? We take the password you typed into the sign in box and run it through the same hashing function as we used to store your password in the database. So your “attempted” password is now encoded in the same way as the stored password. If the two big numbers match, we know that the password you typed is your real password. If they don’t match, then you don’t get to sign in. A hashing function will always produce the same result given the same input, so this works reliably. There’s nothing random about it.

Why do we bother? Sutton Active isn’t as sensitive a website as say your online banking but we do our best to give a reasonable level of security. Many people use the same password on many websites, including more sensitive systems such as their email account and quite frankly we really don’t want to know what those passwords are. So if someone breaks into Sutton Active, it makes it that little bit harder for the hacker to do anything useful with the data.

Like all security measures, password hashing isn’t foolproof. If an unauthorised person got hold of a copy of the Sutton Active database, there are various ways that can be used to try to reverse the hashed passwords and recover the original ones. This is particularly easy if your password is just a standard dictionary word, which is why you shouldn’t use “banana” (or for that matter, “password”) as your password. Password hashing is the security equivalent of putting a lock on your front door. It deters casual attacks and makes life that bit harder for the determined attacker. Worth doing, but if you need Bank of England-style security, look elsewhere.

I’ve changed the way you sign in to Sutton Active.

Previously, you would sign in using a username (which you created when you joined) and your password.

Now, you sign in with your email address and your Sutton Active password.

This should make things easier for people as it’s one less thing to remember and one less thing to choose when you first join the site. All the old usernames have gone. Forget about them - you won’t need them any more.

You should use the email address that you used when you first joined the site. If your address has changed since then, please get in touch and I’ll fix it for you.