Batch forums
One room per year, and nobody else gets in
The batch is the unit alumni associations actually organise themselves around, so it is the unit the forum uses. There is nothing to configure: the room for 1994 exists because somebody left in 1994.
- Rooms
- One per leaving year, made automatically
- Cross-batch access
- Refused by the server
- Thread title
- Up to 160 characters
- Post and reply
- Up to 5,000 characters, plain text
How it works
Nothing to set up, nothing to join#
Every member belongs to exactly one room, decided by the batch year on their record, which they cannot change. There are no invitations, no membership lists and no moderator to approve you. Open the member area and your room is there.
A thread has a title of up to 160 characters and a body of up to 5,000. Replies are also capped at 5,000. Threads by members who have been deactivated or anonymised drop out of the listing, and the author of a thread is emailed when somebody replies. Posting is throttled to fifteen threads and thirty replies an hour per member.
The boundary
Private means refused, not merely unlinked#
Reading another batch room and posting into one are both refused outright by the server. There is no clever URL, no shared link and no admin toggle that opens a room to a wider audience. When a member of the 1988 room is told the conversation stays inside the batch, that is a statement about the code rather than about etiquette.
A locked thread refuses new replies with its own distinct answer, so a member who tries knows the thread was closed rather than that something broke.
Moderation
All of it is admin-side, all of the time#
What an administrator can do
Pin, lock, hide or edit any thread, and hide individual replies. Threads and replies are reached through one moderation screen with the replies listed underneath their thread.
What a member cannot do
Edit, delete, report or flag anything at all, including their own posts. A typo in a thread title is a message to the committee.
Contact requests are watched too
Member-to-member requests appear in the admin panel as read-only oversight with a single action, remove for abuse. Staff cannot read the conversation that follows, because there is not one.
Batch representatives are a label
The flag names somebody on the batch page and stops there. No powers, no queue, no per-batch moderator role.
Plan for this before you switch it on. With no member-side reporting and no member-side deletion, every correction reaches you as a message from a person. For a few hundred alumni that is fine and arguably healthier than a report button. For several thousand, decide who is watching before you announce it.
Questions about the batch forums#
How are batches created?
They are not created at all. A batch is the leaving year on a member record, so the room for 1994 exists because somebody left in 1994. There is nothing to set up, nobody to invite and no joining step.
Can somebody read another batch room?
No. Reading and writing across batches both return a hard refusal from the server, not a hidden link. That is the whole promise of the feature and it is enforced in one place.
Can members edit or delete their own posts?
No, and this is the limitation to plan around. Members cannot edit, delete, report or flag anything, including their own words. Every correction is a job for an administrator, who can pin, lock, hide or edit a thread and hide individual replies.
Can people post photographs in a thread?
No. Bodies are plain text, escaped when displayed. No rich text, no Markdown, no attachments, no images, no mentions, no reactions and no search inside the forum. It is a noticeboard, not a chat app.
What does a batch representative do?
Today, they are named on the batch page. The flag is a label with no powers attached: there is no per-batch moderator role, so a representative cannot lock a thread or remove a reply.
Look inside a batch room
Sign in to the demo as a member and open your own year. Then try to open somebody else and watch it refuse.