Non-monthly Update

[Electronic Punk]

Just a quick update on what has been going on recently, I have called this a newsletter, but I won't be mailing it out - it just seemed like a good thing to call it, as I am just gonna offload a whole loads of exciting (?) stuff.

Promotion

We lost the info on how to help promote OSNN in various places, if you are so inclined. There is no real reason to use it here on OSNN, as we have the headlines at the top already!!
You can use the following images! (in either vbcode or of course html)

http://www.osnn.net/images/banner/banner_468x60_var1.jpg

http://www.osnn.net/images/banner/banner_468x60_var2.jpg

http://www.osnn.net/images/banner/banner_468x60_var3.jpg

http://www.osnn.net/images/banner/banner_468x60_var4.jpg

Reviews

Well that title could mean two things, firstly we will start our reviews going again soon now that the site is starting to settle down a little bit. I will be figuring out how to review my graphics card when it is actually available and I know Sazar might have a few things lined up for us, so if you want to try and review something, feel free to ask me for advice and of course, I will be more than happy to add it to our reviews section, hopefully.

The other kind of reviews are of the site over on Alexa:
http://partner.alexa.com/amzn/redirect_to_detail?url=http://www.osnn.net/

Would of course appreciate your feedback (and 5 star rating? 😛), try not to submit multiple reviews. I know it doesn't actually go towards anything, but it makes me feel better!

Microsoft Listing

Having had NTFS.org and XP-erience.org listed previously (and oddly deleted due to lack of existence), OSNN has now been added to Microsoft's list of Expert Zone related sites. Excellent news and I hope we can continue you to help the ever increasing number of users that need our help.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/related/default.mspxhttp://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/relatedsites.mspx

Adverts

Been doing a bit of work with our current Burst advertisers to get rid of these "default" adverts, that is those that say Ad Desktop, advertise with is we are great and take this survey... they were driving me mad. Rather like Smokey's trail blaze, but its a start. I also got stuck into a contract for something called Intellitext - these ads will double understrike selected text and make these keywords act as adverts themselves. I haven't actually seen these in action myself (they will only be seen in category indexes in Orbitz on the frontpage), but as I know the layout and code of the frontpage pretty well by now I have seen that it is causing a small layout glitch (invisible to the unbothered eye), these are not obtrusive adverts tho, so I hope they work out for us well. By obtrusive adverts of course, I mean interstituals, pop-ups and pop-unders, OSNN will never willingly have these kind of adverts or clickthroughs so if you see any let me know where you saw it, what it was advertising and I will look into the matter. Of course the adverts our necessary to keep us running, I am in the red at the moment, but as soon as we get a little money from this I have my eye on two new servers which we will take our time setting up, won't quite be so rushed this time around. Well not so much but of course I will be eager to see these beasties in action - will hopefully be sometime before the end of the year, but lets see how things go.

Legacy

My little pet name for the project that involves reintroducing all the old threads back into their relevent section on the forums as well as some other stuff that has yet to happen. It is going really really well and it is good to see that so many of our members are helping us out. From an original number of posts exceeding 369,000 we are down to under 99,000. Of course we are always looking for more people to help, so if you are bored and want to try a different kind of community therapy send me a message and I will do my best to get you added as a "Legacy Moderator". I haven't decided on what thanks there will be, but of course you will have my eternal appreciation.

 

[Electronic Punk]

Just another random update.

Legacy

There are now less than seven thousand threads to move. In terms of posts that means that out of 369,000 posts that needed to be moved just under 39,000 are left. Quite incredible! Work continues and evetually the old posts will be completely reintegrated into the forums and it will be like they never left!

New Old Members

This evening I finally managed to restore users original join dates based on when they made their first post. There were a few complications with a few users who had registered but never posted and they have either been resorted manually or removed. Sorry if you were one of these users, but you should be able to sign up again using exactly the same name and continue not posting. Aside from that we now have a userbase with join dates going back as December 2001.

Reputation

Due to the increase in "Reputation Power" that restoring the original join dates I have shifted the Reputation bands substanstially. In order to get the next "pip" you will have to recieve 150 reputation points, aside from the first pip which is worth 1 point.

Toplists

OSNN has recently entered a few top site lists to promote the site, spread awareness and generally rock the world:

Neowin Topsites
- Rate OSNN
- Vote for OSNN

TweakXP Topsites
- Vote for OSNN

NewsGroups

OSNN now has two (currently) newsgroups integrated into the forums. The posts here are not added to our totals and users posting from other applications currently appear as guests. This feature will be enhanced as time goes on. You can view the newsgroups here! OSNN Members (and guests) have the ability to read newsgroup threads as if they were forum threads, which is much easier. Not only that, but members can also reply to threads and create new threads as if they were visiting the newsgroups themselves. And you can check out a demonstration below. In order to reduce spam to your registered e-mail accounts a bogus osnn account is used instead. The newgroup forums are syncronised with the Microsoft servers every thirty minutes.

Product / Event Reviews

I recently visited Microsoft over in Seattle and have been writing up a report, its pretty long and really should be finished already, I also want to write a few game reviews as well as a review for the Creative Zen. I am always happy to post good reviews that our members provide so if you have a review you have just written let me know and I will get it posted up. The best format to actually post a review is actually as you would a forum post!

Other Stuff

We have another promotion image if you want to use it! Slightly smaller for those hard to fill places:

http://www.osnn.net/images/banner/banner_300x40.jpg


I am just about to integrate PhotoPost PHP Into the forum, We have new smilies, or not so new, but they look better and there are more of them, the vbulletin ones were a bit too gheh as some people say. To round it off the year started badly for NTFS.org but has ended OSNN.net - infact OSNN is now a featured Microsoft community which allows me greater community with various people at Microsoft. I am both proud to be a member and proud with how well the site and it's members have done. Thanks all.

 

[Electronic Punk]

In the last year 369,000 posts have been moved into the correct sections, moderators and administrators were able to move these in quite large batches by using keywords in message titles and then sorting thru the threads, not as easy tasks but completely overshadowed by what follows. These users manually checked threads and moved them to the correct forums:

Hipster Doofus threads moved 7566
hsn threads moved 1508
TittleBitties threads moved 874
rushm001 threads moved 796
~bk threads moved 515
Taggert_LOA threads moved 95
muzikool threads moved 45
the_music_man threads moved 45
Henyman threads moved 44
ZeroHour threads moved 38
GoNz0 threads moved 19
unknownsoul threads moved 15
Tabula Rassa threads moved 17
Howling Wolf threads moved 11

Amazing guys, a year may seem like a long time but for the number of threads it was incredible. I will have to find them something else to do now. Feel free to rep em all! 🙂 (If I missed anyone feel free to shout at me)

 

[Electronic Punk]

Ok a small update, just over a year since the last!
So lets see what has happened... nope, can't remember.

Firstly new staff, kcnychief has been brought on as another moderator. Going with tradition I can't remember if I told him or not beforehand. We also might have some new newsposters, but I honestly can't remember - the current batch, American Zombie, tdinc, VenomXt and zeke_mo have all been long term members of OSNN well before joining the news team. We are always looking for people who enjoy posting news, so give me a shout either on the forums or at electonicpunkatosnndotnet if this is something you have always felt like doing.

Since the last update we are now running on FreeBSD6, Apache2.x and PHP5.x and gone from a Pentium 4 system to a dual Xeon rig, which is all very nice. All this needed because we have also had a huge influx of members. To be fair most of these members only came for one reason and that was for some Motorola drivers. We now have over 60,000 members. The files they wanted were for the Motorla V3c and V3 which have now been downloaded, including after the time I allowed downloads for non-registered members, a staggering 93,000 and 973,000 times respectively. For those counting thats over a million downloads.

Our folding team, which as of writing is 160th in the world (no small feat) has once again merged with another team, namely www.nvnews.net meaning that as well as being part of www.spammers-paradise.com we now have even more people folding for us. You can get more information and perhaps even join us here: http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php?t=636

Last week the forums were once again upgraded to the latest version of vBulletin, this caused a little bit of downtime as the update was a little more extensive than I anticipated, basically Jelsoft had a value in a table row called IsBannedGroup, where a value of "true" would mean that the particular group was banned right? Well up until 3.5 this was the case, but now the question is posed as: 'This Usergroup is not a 'Banned' Group' a complete reversal. Having an integrated frontpage, it mean't half the site was totally confused and though that everyone was banned. A rollback was considered, but I worked to resolve that and any other issues as fast as I could.

Recently, I have been doing alot of work on the frontpage and removing what I felt was just taking up space and really not necessary. At the same time, I had a brainwave for a method of removing adverts for subscribers on the frontpage, so I tried it out and it is working very nicely indeed. That now means, with potential rare exceptions which I need to either find or hear about, subscribers should not see a single advert on the site.

So as you can see, for particular groups, the frontpage is now advert free and everyone has the option of collapsing the headline box which is a real cool option for those of us that really like things to be minimlaist.

Why have subscribers? Wasn't really something I was going to promote but I often get people wanting to donate and well, I don't accept donations so this was to circumvent that. So if you have wanted to donate and can't or just don't feel like having adverts shown you can go here: http://forum.osnn.net/payments.php - obviously not something I am pushing, but the option is now there for you.

There is still lots of work to be done on the site, to be honest the new forum upgrade kind of slowed things down a little bit. My aim is to get the site functionality where I want it and then to approach a third party for coming up with a new style for OSNN. I have had great fun designing the previous incarnations of the site but I want to see what a professional can do, I am also hoping they can help me decide a new corporate identity (ie branding) for the site. The orb we have today, although heavily adopted, really isn't ours and can be found in other places on the net if you search hard enough.

I will keep vBulletin updated as new betas are released so keep in mind that they are betas and they will have bugs.

The frontpage also needs a bit more of the text and images updating and once things have settled down a little, we will be doing those next.
Now I think I am gonna mail this to 60,000 people, I fear retribution!