The new Group structure and the not-quite-as-new Page structure are two potential replacements to the old Groups that we can use to organise people. While the new Groups retain the ability to invite all members to an event, they’re also much less polished than Pages. A Page allows the dissemination of updates whereas Groups are meant to facilitate people posting to each other. Pages represent an organisation whereas Groups represent, well, groups of people.

We’ll be more easily found with a Page, I think. Pages allow for vanity URLs — you can’t have a customised URL like http://facebook.com/warwickatheists that links to a Group. At the bottom of my posters, it would be utterly useless to put facebook.com/groups/2391396481/ because nobody would remember it, whereas as long as people know how to spell ‘Warwick’ and ‘atheists’, they can easily find us. Pages allow us to make status updates that can appear in people’s news feeds, associate ourselves with other pages (such as the AHS’s) and throw a ‘like’ box on the website so everyone can connect in as few clicks as possible.

But is any of that a reasonable substitute for being able to grab users and throw them right into the event itself? I can’t imagine that, even with the low amount of attention an event invitation seems to get (there are far more “awaiting reply” non-responses than RSVPs, amongst attending and not attending members alike), a Page posting an update would get nearly as many.

So I’m going to run both. I’ll run a new Group and a Page for a while. This will allow us to both automatically invite members of the Group while also then posting the event as an update from the Page. It’ll be a bit unwieldy but hopefully the society admins can determine from concurrent use of both systems which one is more effective and more suitable for our uses. Then it’s a simple matter to unpublish the Page (until we have at least 5000 Group members, at which point mass-inviting stops working) or close down the Group and switch to using just one.

President

Will Wybrow

Secretary

Tom Knowles

Treasurer

Matt Barwood

Events and Socials

Chris Cross

To counterbalance last week’s at least mildly intellectual film screening, the society is taking to Pop! for a place in the Copper Rooms in which to get some drinking done. Come along dressed as your favourite god or goddess and join in with the Warwick Atheists drinking game.

Tickets can be purchased in advance from the SU website and cost £3, or they can be bought on the door for £4. We’ll be heading in at 7pm, so find us outside the Copper Rooms at 7pm. If you want to drop by later, we’ll be the bunch loudly accusing each other of being heretics.

On Wednesday, we will be screening the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, a film directed by award-winning film maker Brian Flemming. It promises to do to religion what Bowling for Columbine did to gun culture and what Super Size Me did to the fast food industry. It explores the case against the Jesus Christ that modern Christians worship and the culture that has sprung up around the myth.

The film will be showing at 3pm in the PLT on the science concourse. You may confirm your attendance on Facebook if you wish.

It’d be great to see you all there. If, afterwards, enough of you want to head into the SU to discuss the film or just to socialise, we’ll probably be heading to the Terrace Bar or the Dirty Duck when it’s finished.

The film’s running time is 62 minutes. We’ll try and get started on time so that anyone with commitments at 4pm can still make it!

First social event in the Dirty Duck

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the Duck last night! It was great to see you all. Why not join our Facebook group and introduce yourselves?

As events are scheduled we’ll be adding them to this website, along with whatever interesting godless stuff we happen to find interesting.

So you all know, our first social is going to be tonight at 6pm in the Dirty Duck. We’ll be the ones in white hoodies!

Anyone who has yet to join, don’t delay! It’s FREE and you’ll get all the latest info in our newsletter.

Join at WarwickSU.com!