For many years, the SRCF has offered society accounts to everyone from university societies to undergraduate projects, collectives of friends and in at least one instance, a college. For historical reasons, we used to call these “society accounts” when we meant “group accounts”. Finally, we are fixing that.
Over the next few weeks, we will be migrating from calling these accounts “societies” to what they truly represent: “groups”. This change will involve both surface-level and back-end modifications but none will impact current users apart from a few cosmetic changes across our main website, docs and control panel.
Motivation
Recently, the choice of the word “society” has become a topic of interest in the SRCF community with it being fundamentally a misrepresentation of the target audience for our services. We do not, in fact, intend to restrict services just to societies but rather welcome with open arms any group of people willing to collaborate. By calling these accounts with their right name, we hope to achieve greater inclusivity, user friendliness and outreach for both us and our users.
More information
This change will not impact any of your existing services on the SRCF. You might see some minor wording changes across our documentation, main website and control panel, however. We have put redirects in place, in order to ensure a smooth transition.
The change will be gradual; at first involving surface-level changes to our websites, and then later at a deeper level on our systems.
We are also discussing the following steps:
- Offer
*.group.srcf.netin addition to the existing domain for societies - Provide support for group accounts on machines by symlinking
/home/groupsto/home/societiesand likewise for/public/home/societies
The above changes are tentative and we will post again to keep you updated on the latest community feedback and our own decisions regarding this migration. We welcome any feedback on this, so please get involved (see below)!
It is inevitable that some odd mention of “society” will still come up. Indeed, if you have spotted ucam.org anywhere, it is because we are still cleaning up and offering backwards compatilibty since our last domain migration over a decade ago.
Final words
As always, you are welcome to get involved in order to have a more active voice in our community or email support@srcf.net with your ideas and thoughts.