CowTownDance.com is a free and open community.  This means that it will always be free for anyone to visit the website, read announcements, read and write reviews, post photos, and participate in public and private discussions with other dancers.   In order to actively participate in the community, however, you will need to register to create an account at CowTownDance.com.  Registration is free, and your email address collected during the registration process will never be revealed, given, sold or loaned out to anyone, unless you make it public.  By default, your email address and any other information you specify in your account profile is private, and only becomes public if you specify it to be so.

If you choose not to register with us, you will still be able to view messages and announcements on the site by browsing to them.  However, you will not be able to receive announcements via email, participate in any discussions, post photos, vote in polls, rate or review dance venues, or receive private messages from other CowTownDance members.

Click here to register at CowTownDance.com

Although the dancers in Calgary make up the heart of the CowTownDance.com community, the organizers and managers of dance venues play a crucial role.  This is where you come in.  The success of the community depends largely upon the quality and completeness of the information about dancing events that is posted on the site.  If you organize and/or operate a dance venue in the Calgary area, I am wagering that putting the time into being a part of the online community will pay off for you. 

CowTownDance announcements are partitioned into several sections (categories) and specific forums (subcategories). This breaks up the information flow, so that dancers only interested in one area of dance (e.g. ballroom, latin, swing or country) can choose to only receive notifications from those dance venues.

As a dance venue organizer or operator, participation in the community requires registration with CowTownDance.com.  Registration is free, straightforward, and requires two steps.  The primary reason for requiring registration is so that we can limit who is allowed to post to the site's news forums, and to the email subscriber list.  This will guarantee that junk/spam or accidentally sent messages (such as has happened in the past on the CowTownDance mailing list) will not be posted or sent out to the community.

Instructions on the two steps for registration are listed below.  Before you register, however, there are just a few things you should take note of.

It will generally be our policy that dance venues will only be entitled to one account on CowTownDance.com.  That is, the operators, managers, and/or owners of the dance venues wishing to be a part of the online community will only be able to post announcements from a single CowTownDance account, and from a single email account.  Dance event announcements will only be allowed in specific news forums, and these forums will not allow posts from the general public.  This will ensure that users subscribing by email to these announcements will not receive messages accidentally sent from individuals in the community, or any kind of junk mail / spam.  Personal accounts on the site, however, will be open for use by whomever. You can, of course, sign up for a personal account in addition to a single account for your dance venue, but as mentioned, this account will not have permission to post in the news forums.

Because of these conditions on accounts at CowTownDance.com, I have a few recommendations about how you should configure and use your account.  First, I recommend that you give your account a name that reflects your dance venue's name.  For example, if your dance venue was called, 'The Dance Spot', you might want to give your account a name of 'thedancespot' or 'Dance Spot Calgary' when you register for your account.  This will make it easier for community members to easily identify who the announcements are coming from when they see a post or email from you.  Secondly, if there will be more than one person that will be posting news or announcements for your dance venue, share the account username and password amongst all such individuals.  That way they'll all be able to post information, as necessary, without the need for having more than one account. 

Click here to register at CowTownDance.com. Note that you'll need to contact the Site Administrator after your account has been verified in order to gain full dance venue access to the site: admin@CowTownDance.com