It’s not a great story, but occasionally people ask me why there are two Facebook groups – Eldene News and Eldene Community. Here’s a potted version of the story.

In 2013 I created the Eldene Community group as there was no Eldene Facebook group as a way for neighbours to share interesting info.  It grew fairly steadly, just by friends adding friends, as well as random searches.  A year or so later I went to a community networking group and this grew into the Eldene Residents Association (ERA), which met for two or three years and arranged a tabletop sale, many litter picks, hustings and a few other things.

When the parish council was set up, this seemed to supercede the need for the ERA, and there was a lack of people attending meetings, so the decision was made to wind it up.

The Eldene Community group continued however, and as it grew there were some people who were not happy with some decisions that admins made (by this time there were 3 admins, me and two others), in particular which content would be allowed to be posted.  Not every decision we made was right, but the general idea was supposed to be polite discussion about Eldene.

In April 2018 a person who had been banned from the Eldene Community group for repeated unpleasant behaviour set up another Facebook group and called it Eldene Community, and took the same header picture.  We reported this to Facebook, but received no response, as we are a very small part.  We decided that it was not worth causing a further fuss about, as we don’t actually gain anything from the group, it’s just a public service, so in order to avoid confusion we changed the name to Eldene News.

So that’s the story – from my point of view it’s unfortunate that there are two, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to shut ours down as the other is run by someone who was banned for unsavoury posts.