General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR as its widely known.

Compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation requirements (effective 25th May 2018).

To most people this will be incredibly boring information but I felt that some explanation might help in understanding how & why changes on the website are being made for YOUR benefit.

In order for ANY website to run that involves others' involvement it is normal for that website to record information that can uniquely identify an individual (for example: names, photos, email addresses or IP address). It is necessary for Club Motorhome to comply to the new standard.

These required standards are extremely lengthy but for the purposes of this post include the following:

Explicit Consent:
Users need to give explicit consent for the website to collect their information. This consent cannot be masked in a lengthy 'Terms and conditions' text, but needs to be separate and very clear to the user.

Access to information:
Access to the offered information: it is necessary to allow users to view the information collected from them on the site.

Allow option to remove information:
Option to remove the information: it is necessary to offer users an easy way to withdraw their consent and remove their information from the site.

Up until GDPR it has been acceptable to make clear that a website collects 'cookies' and users have had to click 'accept' to make that message go away - not any more!

There is a mountain of work required to comply with the new requirements and this will all take place prior to the regulations coming into effect.

Initially, any submission forms (pubs, stopovers, photos, contact etc) now have another tick box so that the person submitting the form can explicitly consent to Club Motorhome receiving and therefore collecting their inputted information. Some might say Bonkers! But there you go - as of today this is already in place on Club Motorhome. Together with the ability to see what forms the user has previously submitted which can be edited or deleted by that user.

I'll be working through the rest of the software from now on and if you see, what seem to be pointless, extra tickboxes and the like don't blame me, just say thanks to the Eurocrats!