Spring Cleaning The MUG Center’s Surfboard Listing of Mac User Groups

The MUG Center has just completed our annual spring cleaning of our Surfboard, our comprehensive list of Mac User Groups all over the world.

We learned quite a bit from visiting several hundred MUG sites over the past few days, and we’ll be sharing some of that wisdom soon. In the process we dropped quite a few groups, updated links for quite a few others following Google searches on dead links, and even picked up several new listings as a result of those searches.

Having the largest analog list of Mac User Groups on the web isn’t much of a resource if half the listings are dead or out of date, so we changed our rules for this year’s update. We encourage you to visit the Surfboard and confirm that your group’s listing is present, in the correct place and with the current URL. You might think we already did this as part of the review, but sometimes it can be hard to tell if we found the right site.

To get listed or stay listed in this year’s review, a group had to meet these requirements:

• There has to be live link to the group’s site (obviously)

• We know that groups have different schedules and that web sites don’t always get updated as regularly as they should be, so this year’s cut off was to show some signs of activity in 2007. If your group’s site didn’t look like it had been updated since December of last year, the link was removed.

• Groups who have “brochure sites” or pages i.e. no dates, no listings of meeting topics, just statements of existence and a generic listing of meeting dates and locations were left untouched.

• In the event of a dead link, we Googled both the group name and acronym to see if we could locate a new, updated site. In many cases we were successful, but not all, so be sure your group is still there, especially if you recently changed your MUG’s URL.

• In those unusual cases of groups who’s sites didn’t appear to have any dates anywhere and signs of life couldn’t be confirmed or denied, we opted to leave their listings intact.

• For groups who publish their sites in languages other than English that we aren’t fluent in (and that’s pretty much everything else), we opted to continue the listing unless the activity on the site was so obviously old, even to us, that it was clear the MUG was abandoned.

If you find that we made a mistake and deleted your group, or have an incorrect listing, please contact us and we’ll get you re-listed.

While you’re checking your group’s listing, take a few minutes and take a look at some other MUG sites. You’re bound to learn a great deal about what you should and shouldn’t do to make your group’s site stand out.