There have been changes in the UK immigration rules, with effect from April 6th 2015 and some further changes from 24th April. We have updated the visas and immigration page of our website to reflect these changes, view here, as we understand them and strongly recommend all WWOOFers who originate from outside of the European Economic Area to read that page and make careful enquiries at home before arranging their WWOOFing visit. Any host who is contacted by a WWOOFer from a relevant country should make them aware of the changes. Very occasionally one of our members is turned back when trying to enter the country and it is always deeply distressing for them, their families and their hosts and we want to help avoid this happening.
We very recently passed 10,000 likes on our Facebook page! Thanks to everyone who has liked and is following us. Mike Hammer is always happy to receive your news and photos, send them to him using socialmedia@wwoof.org.uk.
We have made some other changes to the website. One development arose because several hosts told us that when they uploaded photos to their listings they weren’t always displayed the right way up. We’ve now changed the system so that photos can be rotated if this happens. Thanks to the hosts who let us know about this glitch – we always welcome your feedback and suggestions.
You’ll be aware that it’s possible for logged in members to leave comments on our enewsletter website pages and we have been encouraged to see more and more of you doing so. Unfortunately we hadn’t realised that there is a ‘bug’ in the software that means if you preview a comment before posting it, it gets lost. We’ve disabled that feature now – it was the only way! Thank you to host Roy Turnbull who made us aware of the problem but we are sorry that you lost your lengthy post Roy and we will never know what you wanted to say! We’ve also changed the comments so that now, if you post a reply to a specific comment, the original postee will be told about it. We think that’s better but please tell us what you think.
Due to the increased costs of postage and production we have had to increase the cost of WWOOFer book membership from £20 to £25 for single and from £30 to £35 for joint memberships, from 1st April 2015. Online membership fees haven’t changed!
You’ve probably seen the big Donate button on our website home page – it’s a quite recent addition – and we are receiving a slow but steady trickle of donations using it. Thank you to everyone who’s donated and be sure we will try to use the money wisely.
There are further developments on the way, watch this space!
