What can we do to help?

There is a delightful picture on the Home page of a grandfather and granddaughter looking at each other, grandmother looking on.
It's asking what name you might choose if you are a new grandparent.

Then it asks if you will be Granny or Grandma!
No mention of Grandad, Gramps, Grandpa etc

To be fair, it does suggest alternatives for both grandmothers and grandfathers further down the page.

Grandude anyone?

I believe the very title of the forum being "Grans Net" would dissuade many men from even venturing into the site. Those that do are then immediately met with a section entitled "Ask A Gran" as a great invite to becoming an active member.

Welbeck
I'm a little confused by your post RE the meet up.
You made a judgement on these 'virtual friends' with whom you do have a connection: GN, and yet you went and sat with a group of complete strangers, who, you potentially had nothing in common with ?

my right knee has never been the same after falling down on the way back to the railway station. Bloomin’ loose paving stones

Haha gilly couldn’t have been anything to do with the could it ?

If I remember rightly, there were a few tumbles that day! It was a long walk back to the station ?. A great day ?

I suggested that "meet-ups" be better dealt with because, as I said, proposals and requests for them can get lost or be overlooked as things stand now. They're easy to sort out in areas where there are established groups, not so in places with a scattering of members who aren't in touch already.

A quick look at the Meet Ups/Where Are You? forum shows so many threads that end after a few posts with nothing resolved. Someone starts the thread - often just entitled Meet up? with no indication as to where. Say it's Devon. The following posts will be a mixture of people saying what a good idea it is, perhaps one or two suggesting venues or dates, people from Surrey and Norfolk also wanting to meet up, even someone chiming in with a personal problem they want advice on. Then it fizzles out....or perhaps it's all organised by pm, but who would ever know?

Wouldn't it be better if the forum just had set headings for different areas, so that anyone wanting to organise a meet-up or find out about one would know exactly where to go?

Maggie Gransnet Local was tried a few years ago but didn’t seem to work very well.
Perhaps posts suggesting meet-ups could be pinned at the top of the page, until the meet-up has actually happened, so they wouldn’t fall off the bottom of the Active Threads?

Or the op could keep 'bumping' them.

If they had the name of the area IN THE TITLE it would help. I think I reply to these threads about once a week suggesting this.

I think also that many people expect someone else to do the organising of a meet-up - establishing who is interested and where and when it will happen. That needs someone to keep track of the replies and co-ordinate things. It isn't rocket science, just to read who has replied and acknowledge them, and after a short time to post a summary of who where and when, and book a table if that is needed.

I suppose what I'm thinking of, janea, replaces Gransnet Local with something much simpler, in that it's just a thread - one thread - for each area, where members can post about local meet-ups. Gransnet Local never took off in my area - someone took it on as editor but nobody else ever posted there.

I see what you mean about someone having to own the meet-up thread they start, Elegran, but they meander so (or at least the ones for my area do). The OP might have suggested meeting up in a particular city, four posts down and two venues have been mooted at different sides of the county. If the thread "officially" related to a particular city, I feel it might help keep it focussed.

I agree, Maggiemaybe. You may have noticed that the Scottish ones tend to be centred in an actual town, rather than a county.
In my experience that has always worked.

The recent Glasgow meet up was no problem at all to manage.
The only thing I would advise is, that if you signed for a Meet up keep an eye on the thread.

A couple of members signed up for a previous one in Glasgow, then were never heard from again. That becomes a pain if you are trying to co-ordinate numbers and a venue.

Here in Colchester our meetups have evolved and a table is booked twice a week for both GNers and non GNers. Both are well attended.
Other areas eg. Wanstead have monthly meetups.
Maybe a calendar of events would be useful?

I think the overuse of acronyms is very off putting to someone new. We don’t use them in “real” life and sometimes it is almost impossible to understand what a poster is meaning with them all. Why do all the grannies use them so much ? Not as if we used them years ago when writing, we didn’t at all, except for SWALK !

I think it would, Pittcity. There's so much going on on the site that even if a meet-up has been arranged it'd be easy for locals not to know about it.

Sorry, Pippa22, I cross-posted there.

I think most of us find the acronyms useful. If you're talking about, say, your daughter and son-in-law, it's a lot quicker to type DS and DDIL. Though it does seem that a lot of posters don't like them. I suppose in real life we use names, which are often shorter than the titles. Even then I admit to using initials sometimes!

Or even DD and DSIL. Oops.

I went to a meeting in Oxford once and walked round the Ashmolean Cafe three times looking at all the little groups of ladies there wondering which group were the GN members.
As I had said I was coming, I was hoping that whoever was there would be keeping a lookout eye for anyone wandering around looking lost and would say something

I thought of asking from table to table, but felt I would become suspected by staff of begging, so I just walked out and did some shopping instead.

The last meetup I was at, they were still talking about you absent!

I was a bit worried that it would be awkward meeting the Edinburgh GNs for the first time. I had forgotten the booking name at the restaurant but mumbled my way in - late. I needn't have worried as they were so lovely, natural and welcoming.
My first Glasgow meetup was equally friendly.

M0nica oh no!
I think I was at that along with lemongrove and (perhaps) boheminan plus some others.
I can’t believe you missed us/we missed you

At the latest Glasgow meetup, we all had name badges. It looked as if we were on a school trip! However, we all managed to find each other!

When I phoned to try and reserve some tables, I heard the lady on the phone say to someone beside her : It's an old folks bus run trying to reserve a table, I think they are coming from up north and want to be near the bus station.

Maw There were several meet-ups at the Ashmolean, but this was the only one I could make and I was late because of the difficulty of parking, even in the Park and Rides.

Only two people attended this one, which was the problem. I would have spoken to any group of three or four people, but the cafe was awash with couples of women, a dozen or more, and after wandering round several times, obviously scanning tables, I hoped someone would realise I was looking for someone and might be the missing person who said they would come and would speak to me.

The problem of going from table to table is that inevitably in these circumstances the people you want are the last or nearly last you approach, I felt I might be mistaken for a beggar or chugger of some kind.

That was a shame MOnica
If you're doing anymore in Oxford please could you let me know!?

All this talk of meet ups - new cliques forming maybe....