By Luke Henry Thomas, October 27, 2026
Join, the club and organization management tool replacing MyBAR, is planned to launch across multiple campuses, including Cal Poly Pomona, in early November, following the shutdown of CPP MyBAR in July.
According to Jason Mejia Lu, director of the Bronco Leadership Center, a pre-launch beta of the site will be released to club and organization presidents by late October to prepare their pages and rosters before the full release.
According to Lu, there was a delay to the pre-launch beta earlier this month due to bugs. The beta was originally set to release one week after Oct. 9’s club and organization newsletter announced it.
According to Lu, a primary reason behind CPP replacing MyBAR, which was hosted on Anthology Engage, is because Join is developed by CollegeNET, which also created 25Live. 25Live is the site clubs and organizations use to schedule meetings and reserve rooms at CPP.
With MyBAR, the events had to be uploaded and approved individually on both sites. According to Lu, clubs often only uploaded events to one, so the events feed primarily featured department and college events. Because the two platforms are developed by the same company, any activity scheduled on 25Live will be automatically populated onto Join at launch.
The imported information includes the event’s host, date and time, location, description and future occurrences if the meeting is scheduled as a recurring event. Events can also be bookmarked and viewed on the “My Events” page.
“All those thousands of club events, we want those front and center,” Lu said. “We want this platform to be by students, for students.”
A second reason is whenever MyBAR broke down, the company behind the site, Anthology, wasn’t responsive and took weeks to resolve the issue, according to Maria Cerce, senior coordinator for leadership development at the BLC.
According to Lu, the developers behind MyBAR only released site updates about once a year during the summer, while CollegeNET releases updates for all of its platforms every Friday.
“(With MyBAR) things would work fine, then we would open registration and then it would break,” Cerce said. “We have a lot of folks concerned about being able to register their club because they can’t participate without that registration. So, we would have multiple calls, multiple emails, and it’s out of our hands, we can’t fix it.”
During a demonstration, Lu showed a workflow page that will appear below submitted forms to track their approval process. The page will display completed and future tasks for both the student and the reviewers, including steps such as assigned training.
“This is the feature that we are most excited about,” Lu said. “You can see that students have complete transparency to where this form is in the process … it’s not just going to some mystery place.”
Cerce said this feature also resolves a problem where students didn’t realize when they did not submit a form they thought they did. The site can now directly show users whether their forms have been received, and an email will also be automatically sent to students once their form is received.
Notification alerts will also be customized depending on a student’s position within a club or organization, according to Cerce. This will allow important tasks to be communicated to officers and members based on their roles.
Lu demonstrated the feature in a test notification, which informed the hypothetical president of their personal onboarding tasks, including listing the club’s officers and uploading the current year’s bylaws.
“Depending on your position, you might have different tasks or different information that is top of mind and critical,” Cerce said. “It incentivizes them to use the platform because there’s so much information that’s empowering for them.”
Join’s homepage features a search bar for events and organizations along with promoted events. At the time of the demonstration, however, it only showed BLC events.
According to the demonstration, the search page for clubs and organizations will include filtering options. These filters include categories for CPP’s eight academic colleges and athletics, as well as an option to only show registered clubs. This addition addresses a complaint about MyBAR from civil engineering student and Student Interest Council President Jacob Wiens, who said the search tool on MyBAR felt like a secondary purpose, behind handling club paperwork.
According to Lu, Join will also replace MyBAR as the platform for student government elections. The site will also allow clubs and organizations to hold their elections online, but using the feature will be optional because Lu said those elections are often in-person.
Join will also include a badge system that rewards students for completing tasks on the platform, such as publishing an organization news article or registering for three events. Lu said the badges are similar to achievements in a game.
On the pre-release site, the sidebar also featured a page for managing service hours and another called “Chat.” Lu said managing event check-ins and service hours will be controllable on Join.
According to Lu, the BLC will work with Associated Students Inc. to add club and organization budgets to Join, though he expects it will take a year or two before implementation. Lu said the planned addition will be compatible with Join’s workflow feature.
The shutdown of MyBAR and the ongoing wait for its replacement created problems for some club leaders. Mechanical engineering student and American Society of Mechanical Engineers Publicity Chair Punarvasu Sangam said MyBAR’s absence meant losing the primary place for redirecting interested students at club fairs and orientation days. The absence also removed a universal place for him to share the organization’s email newsletter sign-up.
Computer engineering student and Bronco Esports Scheduler Brendan Han said he hoped Join would improve connecting students to clubs and organizations, a focus he said MyBAR was ineffective at.
“Maybe it wasn’t promoted enough,” Han said. “Maybe it wasn’t user-friendly enough or maybe because the active clubs on campus didn’t stand out from the inactive ones. But hopefully CPP Join can address most of those problems.”