Tonight I updated the contact page to be much simpler.

It now allows for children and audience members to send a message without having to log in or become a member. It will post their message straight onto our blog here under the category ‘Fanmail’! And it will auto-register them with a username, along with an auto-generated password. So that when we reply to the post (say we answer a student’s questions etc) they will actually get a notification that we’ve replied.

I couldn’t figure out a way to make it auto-post to the forum section of the Social Network (along with all the other messages we have received years ago), but this is kinda better anyway, as it’s more prominent on the website.

We used to (years ago) have this facility on the website, for students to be able to send us a message very easily without registering or logging in – as I was referring to you can see many of these messages by going to the Fans & Alpha Audiences group in the Social Network. But unfortunately, back then, it meant that when we replied, because no account had been created for them, they never knew about our replies. So our actors would spend hours replying to all the messages only for the students to actually think we were ignoring them!

Now I’ve finally found a solution to have the best of both worlds – an easy form submission for messages to the actors that doesn’t make children jump through hoops (thus making them lose patience and not bother), and also an auto-rego thing so that the person who sent the message gets the responses. It’s also in a nice area of the website, as a blog post. And this will also post to the Social Network activity feed still, so it will be easy to see. Make sure you reply to any messages we get. Comment on the POST, not as a comment in the Social Network.

We used to get HUNDREDS of messages from children every month, but not any more – because a few years ago I locked down our website to require everyone to be registered. We got a lot of spam too, it was hard to manage.

This should solve all those problems.

I’ve also made it easier to register (and no more spam registrations, with a new picture based captcha thingy which can’t be beaten by spam bots), and easier to send a message as a grown up. There’s a few other tabs as well for finding out phone numbers and facebook details.

Anyway, have a look.

Tour Manager’s (and other cast) – do what you can to try to promote to the boys and girls to write to us, as we know many have questions but haven’t had an easy way to write to us for a few years now.