You might have noticed some small changes around the groups, so I thought it would be best to share everything in one big update.
The Barcelona English Speakers community is presently sat at 1,844 members across 22 groups and we have made some changes over the last couple of months that I would like to update you on.
- We have shut down the previous main group “Barcelona English Speakers” – this was the original group and it had hit the 1024 capacity, with a lot of lurkers and probably old numbers, so we cut it loose to free some capacity in the community and migrated to a new group. You can find the new main group here.
- We are trialling “admin approval” for the main group to cut down on spammers who are always plaguing us with their “US Stocks and Shares” groups. It seems to be working, but it’s a bit of work to communicate to all new member applications and keep this organised across the admins.
- I have been working on a project to publish more English speaking news about Barcelona so the “News Flash” group has been very active as we share these articles there most days, if you are not already a member, you can find the group in the listings here.
- We have split the Sports group into “BCN Sports Talk” for discussing all things sport that is going on, and the “BCN Play Sports” for people that are more interested in playing sports than discussing how bad Man United are. We repurposed the “BCN Snow Trips” – which was started by someone who promptly left (no loss), you can still discuss skiing here. Both groups can be found in the same links as listed before. We also welcome Nijo, Dan and Varun as admins for the new play sports group.
- We implemented a “yellow card” system in the News & Opinions group to keep debate healthy and stop it descending into chaos. The group discusses some very hot topics and can often get emotional so we wanted to keep it healthy. So far no yellow cards have been issued.
We are approaching the annoying WhatsApp group limit of 2000 members soon so we are thinking about how to manage this. The only real way is to split groups into new communities, but the admin team are hopeful that this limit will be expanded sooner rather than later, but we will not be holding our breath.
We have a number of meet-ups planned, including a game of football on 27th September at CEM Bogatell (see BCN Play Sports), the monthly book club meeting on the 11th October (see BCN Book Club group) and bi-weekly Padel at Bens every Tuesday and Thursday at 12pm – check the BCN Padel Hangout for details on how to book your place. Most Saturdays we also have volleyball, check out the BCN Meet-Ups group for more details.
We also have our monthly meet-up at D9 Aribau on the 26th September at 8pm until late. To register for this free event, please sign up here.
We have also opened some social channels where we share news and what’s going on in Barcelona, you can find us on your social media channel of choice – Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X. Finally, we have launched a WhatsApp broadcast channel which also publishes all of our news stories, you can join the broadcast here.
A big thanks to everyone that makes this community so special and a big thanks to all of the event organisers and admins. ❤️
