What's New?

18 Mar 2005

Details of the award to Private Johnson Beharry, the first in 20 years.

27 Jun 2004

The Victoria Cross Reference will be migrating it's content to Wikipedia, the open-content encyclopedia. Recipient pages have been modified so that registered members can assist in this project. More details in this message forum topic.

20 Jul 2003

Registered Members can now completely maintain (edit and delete) their book comments from their MyReference page. When emails sent to members are returned as undeliverable they are marked as such. When a member logs in with an email that has been marked as invalid they will now be notified and a facility on their Profile page allows them to reconfirm their email.

13 Jul 2003

Registered Members who are relatives can now completely maintain (edit and delete) their register details from their MyReference page. Noting when a member has last logged in for their public profile has been fixed. I am also pleased to announce that over 500 people have confirmed their registration so far.

15 Jun 2003

Implementation of free site membership. Only registered members are able to:

• post to the Message Forum,
• track topics in the Message Forum,
• add Links to the Forces & Units, Locations, Campaigns, VCs Publicly Displayed, and Books pages,
• leave Book comments,
• receive email notification when this Site is updated,
• receive email notification when the VC News is updated,
• if a relative, you will be able to submit your details for inclusion on the Relatives Register
• be able to view other Member's public details throughout the site
• further interactive features as they are implemented (such as adding and editing site information direct)

NOTE: All users whose details have been left on the site over the years will have been sent an email with their initial password to login. This will also allow me to determine if email addresses are valid and these will be indicated.

No email addresses are displayed on the site now. Where before, clicking on a person would send an email to them it will now take only registered user's to that person's profile page. If that person has a public email address then that will be displayed on the profile page.

Message Forum users can now track topics without posting messages to them and also turn off tracking themselves - topics being tracked are indicated on main forum list and also on the MyReference page. The Message Forum now also shows the number of views of a topic.

Why the change? - A variety of reasons.

• These days spam email is a real problem and there are now systems which "harvest" email addresses from web sites on which they are listed (for example in message forums). By allowing emails to only be displayed to logged on members it will prevent these automated systems from obtaining member's email address from the VC Reference site. In addition, members do not need to provide a public email address for display (although their private email address through which the site communicates with them must be valid).
• Further, there has recently been a spate of abusive comments on the message forum and various other interactive features on the site. I have implemented basic controls but I hope that by requiring that someone registers a validated email address in order to post messages that it will stamp this out since their email address can be tracked.
• There were several areas in the site database that stored people's contact details in varying stages of detail - message forum, relatives register, people who wanted to receive email updates, people who have submitted site information, etc. and it makes sense to centralise and expand on this so that additional features can be added in the future more easily.
• People's email addresses change over time and I want to be able to provide a simple means for these changes to be managed by member's themselves and also determine which are currently invalid.
• Due to work and home commitments I have far less time to devote to the site than I did a few years ago and membership provides a base from which other people who have offered help in the past can assist in the future once a few more facilities are implemented.
• The site has really taken off well over the last few years (it nows run at about 200,000 page views a month) and I feel membership will foster an even greater sense of community. In the near future I want to be able to allow members to add and edit their own submitted recipient information.

17 May 2003

The Relatives Register submission backlog has now been completely processed and 133 added. My apologies to all those for the lengthy delay. If you made a submission more than 2 weeks ago and it does not appear on the site then I have not received a valid confirmation so you may wish to resubmit.

There has sadly been an upsurge in the number of instances of abusive comments posted on both the Guestbook and Message Forum. I have implemented a number of short-term measures to restrict this but if anyone notices an offensive entry please contact me and I will have it removed.

I am currently developing a long-term solution to this which I hope to release in the next month.

30 Mar 2003

Since the last update according to this page there have been several changes to the site which were not recorded (the Recently Updated page was one and you can use it to see which recipients were updated during that period) - although not nearly as many updates as I would have liked due to changes in work and home commitments.

In this update there is an obituary to Pip Gardner who sadly died 15 Feb 03, another two excellent articles from Harry Willey on Dalziel and Shout, two new books in the VCs of the First World War series with recipient cross-references: The Final Days 1918 and The Naval VCs, and a link to the Victoria Cross Society.

I hope to update the site much more regularly now - although I have quite a backlog to process. Thanks for your support.

30 May 2001

138 award pages updated; remaining photos from the Sapper VCs submitted by Gerald Napier and another 22 grave/memorial photos from Terry MacDonald. 44 more relatives added together with a large number of other photo and change submittions. New book "Elegant Extracts" added detailing the Royal Fusiliers recipients and several News items.

9 Mar 2001

47 award pages updated; a large selection of recipient and grave/memorial photos this time from various people including a great first batch of photos from Gerald Napier. Three more books added including the Sapper VCs now completely detailed. A couple of dozen other pages updated with a variety of submissions from visitors. The Search page improved to find information in the Message Forum and Guestbook. If a recipient has Other Decorations then a problem prevented the last one being displayed, this has now been fixed.

Previous What's New? updates can be found in the Archive.