Welcome to our new forums!

[Gareth]

I would like to welcome you to our new forums. I hope it is a pleasurable experience and I hope to see many new faces and regulars here often.

Im sure you will all agree that the new forum is a lot more cleaner and user friendly. We now host our own forums ourselves and we hope as a group to bring you more feature packed and exciting rich content here as well as on our new look website.

I would also like to thank each and everyone of our visitors for supporting BirminghamIU. You're support is greatly appreciated and hasn't gone unoticed.

Many thanks indeed, Gareth

[Paul]

I would also like to welcome everyone to our brand new forum.

I thank Gareth for his hard work creating the the new forum and transferring all our valued members along with every single post, so making the upgrade as painless as possible.

If you were registered for the original BirminghamIU forum, you should have received an email detailing how you can access the new forum along with your existing posts. This email will have been sent to your registered forum email address. If your email address has changed since registering for the original forum or if you have any other problems or queries, please don't hesitate to contact us at admin@birminghamiu.com and we will reply promptly.

The original forum was hosted using a company called "Proboards". The original service was totally free, but unfortunately this meant viewing Proboards advertisements throughout the forum. It was possible to remove advertisements at an ongoing monthly cost, but this cost would have increased as the forum became more popular. I have noticed from other Proboards forums that these advertisements become more and more intrusive as the forum becomes more popular.

Our new forum is hosted using our existing paid webspace together with our main BirminghamIU website at no extra cost and is currently advertisement free. If we choose to have advertisements in the future, we will be in complete control to ensure they're not too intrusive and any revenue from these would directly benefit the cost of running of BirminghamIU, not Proboards. The new forum already has many more features, but now it's also possible to offer future updates as required. Additionally, we can now access and backup the forum database regularly ourselves making the system a lot more secure.

Please remember the forum is your forum more than it's BirminghamIU's as without it's valued members, the forum is nothing. Thank you and I hope you enjoy the forum.