Hi all,

☀️ Welcome to the April update for Bizcelona English Speakers (BES). The weather has finally turned, the sun is shining, and it feels like spring is truly here. With spring for me comes Primavera sounds, and if you are going to the festival you can find the WhatsApp community here.

🌐 This month, we successfully migrated Barna.news to a new platform. This site now serves as the central hub for all BES community information. Here, you’ll find links to our community guidelines, a full list of our sub-communities, and instructions on how to join them.

🛡️ We’ve also ramped up our defences against spammers. Interestingly, around 30% of all new applicants now appear to be automated bots, likely a byproduct of AI. To combat this, we’ve implemented IP protection to block known spam sources and added logic to our joining process to deter automated scripts. We continue to manually qualify every single applicant to ensure the quality of our groups and this has led to zero spammers in the last 30 days.

📈 Our main "Lifestyle" community is approaching 1,850 members. As we are nearing the 2,000-member limit, we will soon be taking steps to streamline the roster. Conversely, the BES Social community is at a healthy ~1,000 members, so no immediate action is needed there.

🍹 We have several meet-ups coming up, the highlight being next Friday, 24th April. We’ll be at a fantastic new venue called The Lemon Tree (one of the chiringuitos up towards the W Hotel). This is a private event for us, so if you plan to attend, you must ensure your name is on the list at Meetup. This list will be provided to the door staff to ensure entry is exclusive to our community members.

🎾 Our weekly events continue to thrive. Last week saw our biggest-ever Book Club turnout, the Cinema Club enjoyed Silence of the Lambs, and our weekly football, volleyball, and padel sessions are filling up almost the moment they go live.

🤝 On a more personal note, I’d like to clarify how our leadership team operates. Last week, a disgruntled member posted a Spanish-language PDF which was promptly deleted for security reasons. This triggered a rather "narky" response from the individual. I want to remind everyone that our admins are unpaid volunteers who invest their own time and resources to keep this space safe, secure, and "bad-vibe" free. I am incredibly proud of our team, and while reactions like that can leave a bitter taste, they only reinforce why we work so hard to maintain the community’s integrity.

🚀 The Bizcelona entrepreneur group is also performing well, having just hit 60 members. We are currently hosting bi-weekly events; if you are a founder, executive, or entrepreneur, we welcome your application for the next intake in a few weeks. I am also continuing to refine the Barna.News algorithm to ensure the Newsflash and Broadcast channels deliver the freshest daily updates.

⚙️ Brata is working on some exciting developments. Some are being shared broadly, while others are being trialled within the Deals & Freebies community (in the Lifestyle group), exclusive to our active members. To us, "active" means those who contribute to discussions and engage with posts. I am currently developing an automation tool to "auto-clean" inactive accounts to free up space for those who truly want to participate in the lifeblood of this group.

🙏 Thanks to everyone for being a member of this wonderful group. If you have any suggestions on how we can make this community better, please feel free to let any of the admins know.

Owen