For how to update a meeting listing, or add or delete a meeting, see the BMLT documentation, and for the most recent changes, this blog post: BMLT Root Server Release 2.16.0.

A tip: the BMLT server keeps track of the last 5 changes to each meeting (this is limited to 5 to keep the database size under control). So when making edits to a meeting, make all of your edits, on all of the edit tabs, and then save — if you save repeatedly as you edit, you may lose some of the earlier history.

We also have two short videos recorded specifically for WSZF showing how to enter and update meeting information: WSZF tutorial videos. (Root server release 2.16.0 introduced a few improvements over the system in the video, but the basic idea is the same.)

Finally, see the format codes page for a discussion of choosing the formats for a meeting.

NAWS Export

One of the nice things about BMLT is that we can generate an export file with all the meeting information for the zone and send it to NA World Services for them to update their meeting data. We have arranged with NA World Services to send them an update once a month. In return they send us the NAWS IDs for any new meetings and we add those to the database. The upshot is that once you’re on the zonal server, your groups or area won’t need to send updates to NAWS anymore (and in fact should not, since doing so creates more work and potential confusion for NAWS).

History and Backups

If something goes wrong with an update, the root server includes a history of the last 5 changes for each meeting. It also has an interface that can show all the changes within a particular date range or for a particular service body (go to https://bmlt.wszf.org/main_server/semantic/, and pick “Get Changes”). Our hosting company also makes daily backups of the site and databases, and keeps them for 30 days, so we can restore the BMLT database from one of those if need be, or make a temporary root server initialized with the data from one of the backups.