1. The DCA Forum We have an excellent discussion forum which is exclusive to paid-up members of the Association. New members can introduce themselves and tell others about their boats, experience, sailing adventures and so on. There is a section for discussing and asking questions about boats and most importantly each DCA Region has a dedicated section which Regional Secretaries use to announce planning meetings and rally programme updates and in which you will find contact details for rally hosts. You are able to choose which forum topics you wish to follow and how frequently you wish to receive notifications.
To access the Forum you need to create an account in the Members' Section. You cannot login to the section without first doing this and verifying your email address. Any login details you may have set up in the past, e.g. for the old forum, will not work. Once you are logged in you can click on DCA Forum in the menu and you will switch to the page where the forum will load automatically. If you are a regular user of the Forum it is a good idea to bookmark the forum page and then you can log in from there and return immediately to the forum page.
When using the DCA Forum, members should remember that all opinions expressed in the Forum are those of the writers alone and carry no endorsement from the DCA. The cardinal rules are quite simply: Be kind and be helpful!
2. The Old DCA Forum Many years ago a member only forum was set up using free software hosted on servers provided by Nabble. Over the years a lot of content accumulated in this forum, some of which is redundant but some of which remains of potential interest to some members. It exists only as an archive which those who registered to use it in the past can still access with their old login details and new members can still sign up if they wish.
The Dinghy Cruising Association also has an open, public Facebook Group. It has over 11,000 members from all over the world and is used to share stories and photos of cruises and boats, to ask technical questions and find out about places to sail, and to advertise boat related stuff for sale.
It is important to understand that joining this Facebook Group is not the same as joining the Dinghy Cruising Association itself. Anyone with a Facebook account can ask to join the Facebook Group but to belong to the Association itself, you have to complete the application form and pay the annual subscription. The benefits of doing this are explained on the Why Join the DCA? page and the About page.