Hello fellow 3nglishmen and women, and welcome to..

The 3nglish.co.uk Annual Christmas Message.

In this first post of its kind I’d like to look back at the past year I spent observing our burgeoning community and just poke and prod at a few things that have stood out in my memory of our time together on this wonderful medium we lovingly refer to as ‘teh intarnets’.

We’ve all had a great year together. Let’s put up a list with the highlights, shall we?

What happened in the chat channel?

• There was a huge influx of new and interesting people who stayed and passed through looking for a ‘home away from home’, to chat about everyday life or just for information. We counted over 1000 new nicknames on the channel in 1 year. Great meeting you guys!

• There was an IRC meeting in Finland early on in the year. Adalia managed to gather 4 or 5 others together and have a bit of a drink-in. By all accounts it was very successful and no permanent damage was done.

• Geri and Zanfr are back on the chat channel as long self-imposed exiles ended with submission to our will. They have rejoined the legion of slaves we call ‘users’ and are (if anything) keeping people on their feet and talking. Jobez also enjoyed a bit of a time-out when Vidar got hold of one of his links on a work-laptop.

• To combat abuse we added a few nice features to the bots on the chat channel. There’s an anti advertising script, an anti-colour script, a new google script, a youtube script, an imdb script, and an updated and improved weather script. Everyone seems to be having fun and the channel seems to be flourishing because of our measures.

• Dyn, Coolio, Parente, Raatoh, Claudine, Osi, Harv and a host of other veteran users have graced us with their presences again, contributing to the highest number of users online since 2005. It must be the scent of fresh blood…

• We’ve added a number of new operators this year as well. Loads of them, actually. Frood, crome, fokerella and others were fortunate enough to receive the blessings of the community in assuming their moderator status.

What about the website?

• The website’s gone through quite a transformation recently, when we added a front page weblog to function as the front page instead of our forum. This page, while only being online for 3 months as of this article, has attracted between 40 and 100 unique visitors a day, excluding all the bots, faggot rss feeders and spammers. Not too bad for what started out as a small IRC community. The most popular article so far on the weblog is the ‘So who came up with this soviet russia joke anyway‘ article, closely followed by my rant on Italians.

• The forum did great this year as well, garnering about 100000 hits per month. Good show!

• Every year for the past 4 years we’ve held the Bastard of the year competition. This year adalia was the clear winner, beating Greenthum with about 28 votes overall, despite a concerted effort by Greenie to sign up as many of his stoner hippy dance buddies as possible. … ada won and rightfully so. She’s a real old hand at being a bastard, and being a professional psychologist probably has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Greenthum didn’t let himself be beaten without a fight however, signing up 14 legitimate forum users, who still pop in for a visit every now and then.

• We also gained three new owners this year. After a stagnant period of declining amounts of supervision we decided to up the ratio of owners vs. users again and add a bit of new blood to our admin pool. Trip, adalia and Laagje joined us this year in being the controlling powers behind the 3nglish.co.uk. website and chat channel.

On a more personal note:

• Tasha and Psychodad got married! They kept the wedding quite quiet, like me and the wife in 2005. Wouldn’t want any IRC weirdos showing up. Good show, guys! Subsequently Tasha gave birth to a lovely boy which she and her hubby named Gavin. We hope to welcome him to the channel in about 18 years (if Tasha doesn’t threaten to disown him if he does) .

• Erde has almost finished his cabin in the woods and has been trying to get elected into the city council of his home city of Nokia. I’m sure we all wish him good luck in his endeavour, and hope he manages to get Google Earth to update the resolution of that city so we can find out what the hell it looks like.

Well, that’s about what happened here.. tune in on New Years eve for an update on what to expect from us admins and contributors in the coming year.

Merry Christmas!

bouzo.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS