User:Philb28/Escouts

Escouts is one of the largest online Scouting communities and provides services aiding people involved in Scouting, primarily the United Kingdom. The organisation offers free website hosting to Scout groups within the UK, as well as various other services such as website awards and a forum. The forum of approximately 4000 members has an estimated 2,600 hits a day. Similar forums include Scout Forum UK and Scouter, although Scouter has a largely American community.

History
Escouts was first founded in April 2001 by Richard Fairbairn, a cub scout leader. Escouts started life as a free hosting provider using some spare hosting space on one of Richard's accounts. In the spring of 2002, Jonathan Bloor joined Escouts. The pair set up a dedicated server to host scout websites.

In the next few years, a number of people joined and left the Escouts team. The services are now staffed by Richard Fairbairn, Jonathan Bloor, Dave Field, Daniel Haigh, Richard Willars, Graham Macaulay and Gavin Holt.

The site has undergone numerous re-designs throughout its history, but it wasn't until April 2004 that the current vBulletin forum was employed. The latest re-branding of Escouts began in early 2008 and is currently ongoing. It was discussed on the forum that this would bring all the Escouts services together and improve the experience for the end user. All the systems have been designed and built by a development team of Gavin Holt, Jamie Shirra and lead by Richard Willars.

Escouts: Community
The Escouts: Community forums are free to use forums that are used by members of Scouting worldwide to discuss scouting issues, technical issues and life outside scouting. Many Scouting program aids and resources are shared between the community members.

Escouts: Hosting
Another major service that Escouts offers is the free hosting service for UK Scouting websites from members of the Scout Association or the Baden Powell Scout Association. Accounts are also offered for BSWE (British Scouts Western Europe) and BGA (British Groups Abroad) sites. The hosting package includes 100MB of hosting space, free of adverts and pop-ups, 1GB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited POP3 and FTP accounts, Unlimited MySQL databases and sub domains, Full CGI and PHP access, PHPMyAdmin Access, email filters and the Installatron script installer. To view the whole package specifications click here. When signing up, users are offered an Escouts.net sub domain or use their own domain (purchased elsewhere). In March 2008 552 unique hosting accounts were on the server.

Escouts: Route Hiker
Escouts Route Hiker was designed to make planning hikes easier. It allows the easy calculation of Route Card values and enables the user to plan a whole hike online at no cost. It is intended to be used by Scouts, Guides and people taking part in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme. Escouts Route Hiker will be available until the commercial version of the application is released.

Retired Services
Escouts: Badges was developed so young people could work their way through Scout badges online. Leaders were also able to share programme resources. This project was retired in late 2006.