A2K 2008 Year in Review

Well, the year's over. And the many A2K managerial and creative teams and I hope you have all had a good 2008 and as much fun (with a little learning, too) on Able2know as we have. Huzzah and good times in 2009!

Here's some information and a review of last year that we hope you'll find of interest.

2008 was an eventful year. Every time you turned around, it seemed, something was happening. A2K was on the move in a lot of ways, including literally, and we all felt at least some of it.

Passings

No passing was felt more than that of Noddy24. It was as if an earthquake had hit A2K. On August 5th of 2008, she passed onto the other side while in a hospital, being treated for, among other things, Crohn's Disease and edema. The members of A2K lost a good friend and the moderating team, well, we lost one of our own. It was to our great honor to identify her as a moderator. We miss her wise counsel.

Noddy was on staff for years, and handled Featuring and Defeaturing. With tagging on the new site, this task is performed on a more automated basis. We like to think she'd've been an excellent, witty and compassionate tagger.



New Beginnings
The biggest new beginning was the changeover to new software. Tagging replaced categorizing and ignoring and voting down enhanced moderation and made it more possible than ever before for members to control and personalize their A2K experience. We're very excited about it, still.



Expertise, Traffic and Forums
Expertise
Members have astounded us with their knowledge of everything from the history of the Maccabees to how to get Australian citizenship to understanding why our pets do what they do. We continue to perform a good service helping people get (and keep) Spyware off their computers, but the loss of timberlandko does make that harder to do as he was so very good at that.

We offer good relationships, child rearing and pet care advice. We offer good Latin translations and fair Hebrew translations. We offer a good place to debate the issues of the day.

Traffic
On www.alexa.com, our traffic ranking has been good, see:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=www.able2know.org Throughout the year, we've consistently reached about .006 persons per million on the web. In contrast, very large sites, such as CNN, reach about 3 web users per million.

We're #21 on Bigboards.com's list of the largest Internet forums using English (up from last year) and written in phpBB, see: http://rankings.big-boards.com/?sort=posts&filter=phpBB,EN&p=2 (these are ranked by number of posts). We're #33 when it comes to number of members (also up from last year),
see: http://rankings.big-boards.com/?sort=members&filter=phpBB,EN&p=2
The membership figure on Big Boards is probably a little misleading and seems to be out of date.

Spam
There's been considerably less since the changeover to the new A2K. The Moderating Team has done an incredible job keeping the number of spam views down and getting it off the public boards as quickly as possible.

The Team has done Herculean work wading through the trash and getting rid of it as quickly as possible so that we can serve you, our members, more readily and efficiently.

Every report of spam is helpful to us. Even if your report is one of several, that assists us, because it shows us just how urgently we should act to pull a particular post or topic. You can contact the Help Desk by clicking Contact Us at the very bottom of any page. Just follow the
directions on the left (Note: if you click Report on a post, then all you need to do is write the word spam in the comments box, select SPAM - Promotional Post from the drop-down menu and click submit) and we will act upon it as soon as possible. Our continuing mission is to assure that the same cannot be said about the postings on Able2know. And I'm proud to say that the Team is doing just that. Down with spammers!


Forums
With the changeover to the new A2K, interest surged in many new areas of A2K. With members' new ability to separate their personal wheat from the chaff, old chestnuts were found again and new topics took off.

Top News Stories
The world turned and spun and the changes were chronicled, debated and deconstructed on A2K.

The American Presidential election was a mainstay of discussion and fueled discussions for months, too numerous to mention. The historic election of Barack Obama will, we are sure, be fodder for discussion for years to come.



In Conclusion ....
Able2know has grown and progressed in ways that were hard to imagine just a few years ago. Although we are saddened by Noddy's death, we are generally pleased with 2008 and hope to make 2009 even better -- and you, our membership, are the key. We're looking to meet and interact with all of you in the coming year.

On to bigger and better things.

Thank you and have a marvelous New Year.

Signed,
jespah and the Administrative, Developmental and Moderating Teams at
www.able2know.org
Happy New Year!