ShareSoc Website Upgrade

Introduction

ShareSoc is delighted to announce a major upgrade to its website, providing a host of new features for our members and visitors to our site.

These new features supersede our previous Ning-based members’ network and bring all our content together in one place. We have also taken the opportunity to introduce some powerful new features, not previously available on our members’ network. For a period of one year from release of the new version of our website, we will retain the old members’ network, to ensure that no important content is lost, but its forums will be closed to further posts from 1st April 2020. The members’ network will be shut down after that one year period.

We know that a number of our members have struggled to access our old members’ network and our aim is to make it much easier for them to gain access to the wealth of unique content we have available.

Summary

Here is a summary of the new features, each of which is described in a section below.

• Logging in
• Research menu
• Seminar presentations and reports
• Leaders and laggards
• Newsletter archive
• Book reviews
• Member discussion forums
• Gallery
• Improved form filling

Logging In

To enable all of these new features, you now have the ability to login to our website. You should follow the instructions below to login for the first time.

The first time you login to our website you will need to set a password for your account. You can do this by following the procedure below and you will then be able to login to our site.

1. Click the “Login” button at the top right of our webpages .
2. Click the link “Lost your password?”, at the bottom of the login page.
3. Enter your email address (the one we send your copy of our Newsletter to, which is the one we have on file for you) in the box that then appears, click “Get New Password”, and then follow the on screen instructions.
4. When asked to set a password, our website will suggest a strong password for you. We recommend that you accept this automatically generated password, because our service provider is rather fussy about the strength of passwords used and will not accept passwords that it does not consider to be strong enough.
5. Press the “Reset Password” button.
6. You will then be taken to a page saying “Your password has been reset. Log in”. Click the “Log in” link, which will take you to the login screen.
7. Now you can enter your membership number or email address, and the password chosen at step 4 above. Check the remember me box, to keep you logged in for future visits to our website and finally click “Log in”.

If you are having any difficulty following this procedure, you might find this video helpful:

After step 3 above, you should receive an email from our website, with a link enabling you to set your password. If you do not see this email, please check your spam/junk folders, in case it has been diverted there. If it has, please make sure to mark it as “not spam” before actioning it.

Alternatively, please contact our office if you are a member of ShareSoc and still have any difficulty logging in.

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Research

The “Research” menu is a key new feature of our website. From the menu, full members of ShareSoc can view our unique AGM reports and proprietary reports on director remuneration at selected companies. Star of the show is the “Company Research” feature, also found on the Research menu. That feature allows you to search for or browse any UK listed or AIM quoted company and will then retrieve all information we have available for that company, including:

• AGM reports
• Director remuneration reports
• Relevant ShareSoc blog and news posts
• “Leaders and Laggards” posts, praising or criticising the company, principally for its behaviour towards individual investors
• Reports and presentations from any ShareSoc seminars or other company meeting events that the company appeared at

This provides essential background information on companies you may be considering investing in, or that may already be in your portfolio.

Enter the name or TIDM of the company you wish to research in the “search” box on the company research page to retrieve a list of matching companies, from which you can select the appropriate one and then obtain all the information we have about it.

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Seminar Presentations and Reports

All past events that ShareSoc has organised can now be found under the “Events” menu, here.

For each event, full members of ShareSoc can download presentations for all presenting companies, Stockopedia reports for those companies*  and reports by our members on the event*. Users of our website can also see the share price performance of each presenting company, since the event took place, and can view and hear multimedia recordings of the presentations*

*If available

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Leaders and Laggards

We want to highlight companies that engage well with their individual investors (leaders) and those that don’t (laggards). We now highlight companies deserving of a “leader” or “laggard” award on this page, which can be found beneath the news menu. These awards will also be highlighted on our blog page, when they are posted.

If you spot a company deserving of either award, please let us know.

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Newsletter Archive

Logged in full members of ShareSoc can now download any of our newsletters directly from this website. Just select an edition from the catalogue, here (which is found beneath the news menu), and you will find a PDF file containing the newsletter available for download on the right hand side of the list of articles that the edition contains.

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Book Reviews

Our book reviews – again exclusive to full members – can be found under our Education menu, here.

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Member Discussion Forums

Our new electronic discussion forum feature can be found under the membership menu, here. To make full use of our forums, you need to be logged in, otherwise you will only be able to see a very limited number of forums and will not be able to post to the forums.

The forums you are able to see depend on your membership status: many forums are exclusive to full members of ShareSoc and they will only be visible to logged in full members. Some forums are exclusive to SIGnet members and will only be visible to logged in SIGnet or combined SIGnet/ShareSoc full members.

Each forum contains a number of topics and posts need to made beneath a specific topic. Full, combined and SIGnet members only can create new topics within a forum. New topics are subject to approval by a moderator. Subforums can also be created within forums (e.g. the SIGnet forum contains subforums for each SIGnet group). Only the system administrator can create new forums and subforums (but there is a forum topic where you can request that a new forum is created).

Further details about our forums and how to use them can be found in this forum.

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Gallery

A gallery of ShareSoc’s images and videos is now available under the news menu, here. Certain premium videos are only available to logged in full members of ShareSoc. Videos relating to our seminars and other ShareSoc company events can be found by viewing our historical event records, as described here.

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Improved Form Filling

Now that you are able to log in to our website, our forms can behave more intelligently. If you are logged in, your name, email address and membership number will be automatically filled in, so you do not need to re-enter them. So, for example, logged in members can register for our events with one click.

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I hope that you enjoy these new features. Do let us know if you encounter any problems. You can either use the “Feedback” button at the bottom of each page, or our forums to do so.

Mark Bentley, Director, ShareSoc