BAHS forums

Some time ago we were asked for ‘some guidance on the economic aspects of the use of the horse as motive power in the 18th Century’. It gave us the idea that we should have somewhere on the British Agricultural History Society web site where anyone can ask this type of question and everyone can have a chance of answering it. So ... this is our first foray into forums.

Currently we have three forums: one for discussions about Agricultural history (and the history of rural economy and society), which is where you would ask questions like the above example; one for Announcements of relevant calls for papers, conference programmes, new publications, book launches and so on; and one for discussions and questions related to LibRAL. If activity merits it, new forums on more specific subjects can easily be added.

[opens in a new window or tab so that you can have the ‘getting started’ information available at the same time]

Getting started

Please register for BAHS forums, even if you don't want to post anything now. We have tried to make registration as easy as possible. Your username can be between 3 and 20 characters long; your password can be between 6 and 100 characters. Please try to use a secure password: definitely not the same as your username and not something that can easily be guessed.

Then subscribe to the forums you are interested in: you will then be notified by email if anyone posts a new topic or replies to a topic.

To subscribe to a forum, you have to be on the contents page of the forum (click on the name of the forum, e.g. Agricultural history) and then go right to the bottom of the page and click Subscribe forum).

You can also subscribe to a single topic. To subscribe to a topic, choose Subscribe topic from the tools menu (indicated by a spanner icon) immediately below the topic.

Please also read the Forum rules and etiquette.

More about registering

Unfortunately we have had to try to protect the forums against malicious use whereby programs known as ‘spambots’ are used to register and post messages (a relatively benign example would be an advertisement for online gambling). The form of protection we have chosen is a question to answer when you register. There are three questions which are chosen at random and the answer is always a word (or string of letters with no spaces), never more than 5 letters long. In spite of this, we have recently had so many spammers registering that we have decided to approve each registration manually, which might result in a bit of a delay. If you have any problems with this or any other aspect of the forums please use the contact form.