Blowingwind Forum - 2012 In Review

[HendryTan]

Today is the last day of Year 2012. Time to record 2012 History.

1. BlowingWind Forum did some Major Forum Posting Changes ending 2011 where several forum were made POST-ABLE only by Members.

BW Pageviews stagnated initially in Jan/Feb 2012 but have resumed its climb. In December 2012 after we upgraded our hardware and the site becomes more responsive, we average 90+ K Pageviews/day.

2. Our Registered Members also increased rapidly.

We will end the year with 13,119 Registered Members and 475,896 Posts.

3. Let us review the things the forum did this year.

4. In January we started enhancing our profile page with more Personal Infomation including: Height, Weight, Relationship Status and Role.

http://www.blowingwi...showtopic=29240

The was well liked and encouraged more guests to sign up as members

5. Festive Celebrations at BW

We celebrated various festive seasons like Valentine, Chinese New Year, Singapore National Day, Mid Autumn Festival, Deepavali, Christmas etc with online Banners. Almost all the banners were contributions by our readers.

6. Upgraded our forum in April

http://www.blowingwi...showtopic=31523

It had enhancements to profiles and other features.

7. May to June was exciting for readers, the mods and Admin.

We did a trial with a facebook like on page chat and polled our readers.

It was a Big Yes and we managed to raise money to procure a commercial licence for it.

Members love it but the admins had nightmare as the online chat chewed up a lot of our limited CPU resources.

http://www.blowingwi...showtopic=32591

On average members chatted 5K messages/day. This number has since climbed 50% in December.

This is one of those features where BW is trying to keep the forum more interactive, relevant and serve users need better. And within our financial means.

We believe it is features like profiles and Chat that also encouraged more guest to sign up as members as these features are only available to them.

8. In June, BW joined the Community to support PinkDot 2012. We did it with our banner campaigns and joined in calls to encourage our readers to attend.

9. On 30 Jun, BW welcomes our 400,000th post.

The announcement was here http://www.blowingwi...38;#entry438165

10. In July we welcome Bern as our newest volunteer Mod cum Admin to BlowingWind.

Bern came after several rounds of search and interview. With Bern on board, there is now new blood. We now have 100% more admin power to ensure continuity especially BW is self-hosted and we had to do all system admin ourselves.

11. Bern has quickly established himself and make his presence felt.

He started Missed Connections in Personnel

He has taken over most admin functions for BW.

12. In November, BW participated in Oogachaga's Take Action. We submitted our idea "Uncle Agony" and rallied our members to vote for us.

13. In December, BW finally shifted from our aging hosting site.

We did a major procurement of hardware with 5 times more "CPU power", faster Disk and more RAM.

The new chosen hosting site is in California/USA. It is closer to the major Internet exchange point and reaches most users in Singapore faster.

The nett result is that we see BW web-page respond time improving dramatically. Response time is within one second for more than 80% of our readers majority of the time. We hope the upgraded hardware will carry us for another 2 years before we need to procure more hardware.

More important the whole migration was done by Bern. We're confident that we now have in place a new generation of readers, mod cum admin to bring BW forward and hopefully stay relevant to our community too.

14. BlowingWind forum contents are almost 100% reader supplied.

We had many good contributions from personal experiences, their coming out, growing up encounters, their odyssey in life.

We also had many experience sharing from daily work, school to the intimate kinds.

We have the usual fights, trolls, pxxn that the moderators had to rein in.

We also see the presence of the younger generation more. We're glad there is better co-existence with the older members here. We hope everyone benefits and grow as we learn from each other.

15. The mods will like to thank all readers for your contribution and support for the year to make BlowingWind Thriving.

Thanks to you our readers for helping define 2012 and Happy 2013.

[dazza1201]

Thank you for providing us with a forum where few were before!

[Saranghaeyo]

Thanks for making this forum a nice place for aj to hang out with, we made lots of joy and laughter and also bestfriend around this world. (",) I'm happy to join bw since dec2012 but shift to this user.