UKH

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scottishwinterclimbingconditions/members/

Myself and a friend have been trying to become members of this closed group in order to check conditions.  We are quite tech savvy so we are definitely pressing the correct buttons .  We press "join group" which changes to "pending".  We wait a few days and we are not members of the group.  So we press "join group" and it changes to pending....  we have been trying this for a few weeks now. 

I have noticed that daily about 10 new members are added to the group, but it is not us.  Not jumping the gun here but is this due to the our Facebook location currently being "London" regardless of the fact that we are both Scottish.  Our profile pictures are us in the alps, our cover photos are of Ben... we look like ideal members of this group.

Anyone shed any light on this?

I'm having the exact same problem, no idea what's going on. 

Same issue with me also.

Hoping its a technical issue not some pathetic locals clique crap.

The ten new members a day will be due to the migration of UKCer to Facebook because they don’t get the information they use to do on here (too interested in top 40 posters which usually about politics) try ground conditions in the UK sometimes climbers post in both so you may get limited info until you get on Scottish winter conditions.

I'd assume it's technical, I'm a member and there isn't any cliquey bias for new members. The other group to try is Scottish winter climbing partners 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/887261431439443/

Anyone can add members to that group, so find a friend who is in there and ask for an invite. Or feel free to PM your email address and ill send an invite. 

Only the admin can approve requests, presumably he's busy.

On the other hand, any existing member can add other members, so I'd use that route.

There are something like 1700 members, so I assure you there's no 'cliqueyness' involved.

Well said.

That's one possibility. The other is that the two have different but overlapping user bases - one of which has over 2 billion active monthly users.

2 billion users aren’t 2 billion climbers  the problem with UKC is its lost a lot of members to such as Facebook because there’s more up to date information available, for a site that was set up for predominantly climbers this is a shame because over the years I’ve used it it’s been a valuable source of information but now I’m forced into other social media to get to know conditions etc.

I find the UKC winter conditions page very useful. Much more so than the conditions FB pages which seem to fill up with guides posting about the usual venues / routes.

I think that's a really interesting discussion - I've been using the FB Ground Conditions group a lot this winter to think about conditions but the majority of members are walkers not climbers, or lower grade climbers than higher grade climbers - so often looking in photos gives more climbing conditions info than the actual reports. This is only for English and Welsh venues though, so less gets done and less gets recorded than for Scotland over all. It does feel like to some degree that up to date news is drifting over to Facebook though, with UKC becoming more the website of record due to the logbook system.

The UK ground conditions Facebook page I've found pretty good. The off topic posts do need moderating a bit but generally as said above, the photos do tell as much as anything said. If you need to ask questions about frozen turf then you can ask. I've used it to ask about Scottish conditions and had valuable info back.

On the topic of UKC, just block all the non climbing forum areas in your options and it all returns to the reason why you joined. UKC is wonderful because you can filter it but I can't filter Facebook so much.

George McE is the Admin--he is a great guy, and one of the least cliquey people I know. But for sure he's a busy chap.

Spoke to admin, really helpful and explained that he wanted to keep the content on the page valuable.  As I do not use/post publicly on Facebook much so he did not accept my request initially but has now done so all is good. 

I was admin for a group and got lots of member requests from fake accounts / spammers. I took to looking at people's profiles before adding them and didn't add any that looked dodgy. This probably led to me not accepting a few genuine ones.

true enough although some of the guides are good at stating conditions under foot but yes if you're a guide wanting to be noticed then form a group set up for Guides alone. Otherwise yes do us all a favour and when you post tell us whats going on please.