Thanks. Unfortunately I’ve just heard the group have decided to discontinue the forum. It’s a pity as it worked well at the outset.
We also had a difficult issue as the organisation changed its email domain name, issued new email addresses to everyone and turned off forwarding after a few months - so everyone who had signed up with their old email had to login and change their email. A substantial number hadn’t requiring administrators to send emails out as well to maintain comms. I couldn’t change the emails for them and some of the senior team only ever read the email notifications anyway - so couldn’t see the advantage over email. Once they had decided to go back to email there was no incentive to update their email on the forum and it became a no win situation.
Final straw was the comms and admin team weren’t prepared to maintain both the groups and separate email distribution lists. Appreciate what you say about being unacceptable to add people to a mailing list - but when you are simply sending emails out to people in your organisation that’s exactly what they do.
Ah well. I’ve other forums that work well and don’t have these problems. You can’t win them all.