BellBoard

Peals.co.uk website

As part of the development of the Ringing World BellBoard website, it will soon incorporate all of the data and functionality of the peals.co.uk website, which The Ringing World also manages.

In a few weeks, we will stop updating the peals.co.uk website. There will be no significant change from the user’s point of view, except that peals rung from then on will not be added. The site will still work, and users will be able to view all the peals currently in the peals.co.uk database. Most of the information contained within it is now available within BellBoard, and the rest will be incorporated soon.

Peals.co.uk currently plays a vital part in The Ringing World’s typesetting process for peals. But the age of the website is now a problem – it isn’t being actively developed and hasn’t been for years, it is built on antiquated software, and companies which will host it are now becoming rarer. In order to future-proof our typesetting process for peals, we are bringing it closer to the process we have developed for quarter peals, which is entirely based on BellBoard.

In future, the whole typesetting process for both peals and quarter peals will be hosted on BellBoard, which will hold the definitive record. This typesetting process is cheaper, and better automated so as to require less human intervention. As BellBoard is being actively developed, it also allows for further improvement in the future in terms of accuracy and searchability.

This will save The Ringing World Ltd a considerable amount of money in the hosting of peals.co.uk and in the staff and volunteer time involved in typesetting peals and inputting them to peals.co.uk. More importantly, in the long term we are sure we can provide a much better service by merging the two websites; there is no advantage in keeping them separate.

There are some concerns which have been addressed to us about this step. At the moment, performances can be edited indefinitely on BellBoard and they don’t filter through to the corrections columns in The Ringing World. We’re going to take steps to limit what you can change after submission for publication, and if you do make a major change it will automatically create a correction which will be printed. We’re also taking steps to improve data quality on BellBoard before submission. If you misspell Grandsire when submitting a quarter peal, for example, this will be flagged and you’ll be asked if you’re sure this is a new method. There will, of course, still be a human proofreader.

The timing of this change has also been considered, to minimise the negative effects. There are certain aspects whose effects can’t be tested in advance, so we’re trying to phase this as much as possible to minimise disruption. For instance, one major function of peals.co.uk is to generate almost all the data, in almost its final form, for the Central Council Peal Records Committee. The analysis for 2016 is now done and will appear in print soon. The 2017 analysis starts in early 2018, and we’re committed to having everything functional by that time. We’ve looked in detail at everything that they print and can produce high-quality statistics that will match or even surpass this.

There was a meeting in February of representatives of The Ringing World and the Central Council, including Council President Chris Mew and Peal Records Committee Chairman Richard Allton. The meeting was particularly productive and we would like to thank everyone there for their understanding and cooperation.

Peals.co.uk was originally set up by the late William Hall, a Staffordshire ringer who was a pioneer in peal record keeping on websites and databases. In 1995 he entered all the peals that were rung in 1994 and printed in The Ringing World into a database, and soon after he created databases of all towers in Dove and all methods in the CC Methods Committee records, and began to link this work. By his early death in 2004 at the age of 44, he had typed 96,712 peals into the peals.co.uk database, part of a remarkable legacy of work. Peals.co.uk owes its existence to William Hall’s extraordinary work in peal record keeping, and by combining it with BellBoard we are safeguarding his legacy.