Link to the American Discovery Trail Facebook Group

The American Discovery Trail as of the date of this blog entry has two different kinds of Facebook accounts.  First is the more traditional style, or "page" which in my opinion, is better for the American Discovery Trail Society itself to communicate to the outside world, either by it's posts, or ones that it forwards.  Any posts made by other users here will go a "Posts by Others" area that has to be clicked on to be seen.

But it's "group" (https://www.facebook.com/groups/americandiscoverytrail) is much more like a semi open forum on the topic of anything ADT related, such as the trail. gear, food, water, support and maybe even some things about the society itself.  One needs to have a Facebook profile and be a member of this group in order to read, or submit posts.  If you haven't already, you can click on the link above, or copy it into your browser's address bar, press enter and it will take you to the group.  Then click on the "join" button.  This group is monitored for SPAM, so it may take time before your request to join is approved, or not.

My name is MD Edmonds.  I'm an ADTS member from Ohio.  But this blog is 3rd party to any trail agency.

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Two days ago, I conducted an experiment and found out that the "Post to E-Mail" address for the Buckeye Trail Association's Facebook group actually worked after all.   That got me excited, so I attempted to post to it using my SMS Gateway (writing a text message to an e-mail address) and it wouldn't go.

I realized that Facebook wasn't able to associate my cell phone's email address with my profile in order to post, so I attempted to add it to my profile.  Well, it required a confirmation and the number it sent was cut off because of the 160 character limitation of a text message and I couldn't do it.  So, I sent a message from the gateway to my Gmail account.  In there, I found the message at attempted to set it so that it automatically forwards to the BTA's Fb group Post to Email address, but setting up the forwarding addresses also needed a confirmation that was cut off.

So yesterday I got smart.  And set up a forwarding e-mail address on OTHR's domain (which didn't need to send a confirmation).  I strung it all together and what'da know... it doesn't work.  Facebook and blogger both have their own apps and SMS text message submission methods.  But they only work for your own blog or profile.  You can't use an SMS text message to post to the Buckeye Trail's Fb group.

If hikers could, the advantage is it could be used as an "electronic trail register" in place of areas where we don't have physical boxes.  And the system would work as long as the hiker on the end had at least roaming cellular signal.  I'm attempting to determine if it can be done using a web page guestbook.