From the Executive Director:

Executive Update for April, 2005
Posted by Joseph Rowlands on 5/02, 5:59pm

Some of you may have noticed that SOLO was effectively down for a week. All of the moderators were at SOLOC4, and we had too much fun to log in and add articles or any other work. And of course we came back to a pile of hate mail accusing us of censoring people (not letting their posts go through the moderator queue for a few days) and other nefarious schemes. But despite our absence, SOLO had a great month. The number of forum posts equalled the previous month, and the articles were about the same. We have 5 new authors, and a record 153 new members. This increase is probably the responsibility of Luther Setzer, who's been encouraging Ayn Rand Meetup members from around the world to move to SOLO.

On top of the new people, we've added a couple of local clubs. SOLO Kansas and SOLO Missouri. If you don't have a local club near you, I recommend that you start one. Contact me or Luther for info.

Of course, the big event this month was SOLOC4. Click here for the comments and here for details.

During the conference, we had a large planning session where we discussed the future of SOLO, and got some people to sign up as staff. It seems that some people wanted to be involved more in SOLO, but didn't know it was possible. It certainly is! If you want to get more involved, just contact me via email or SoloMail.

One big addition to the staff was made during the conference. Julia Brent had been added in a new position called Director of Operations. The intent is for her to take over some of the day to day running of SOLO, including coordination of staff members, identification of new positions or projects that need to be completed, and recruiting. And I'm sure she has many more ideas. Welcome aboard, Julia!

Another staff addition during the conference was Tenya McCampbell as SOLO Parenting leader. Hong Zhang decided to resign from that position, and Tenya was gracious enough to take over the position. Thanks Tenya! More details here.

We've also added a new interest group called SOLO Fitness, which Ed Thompson suggested and volunteered to lead. Thanks Ed.

We've also added an interested group called SOLO Homo. From the interest group front page, "As SOLO offers a port in the stormy battle for minds, SOLO Homo offers a nearby stop and a safe respite. We do not seek to ghetto-ize ourselves and will actively participate in and engage the SOLO forum at large; when a topic is raised within SOLO Homo that is of interest to all SOLO'ists, the discussion or thread will be posted to the general forum."

New Staff

1.) Julia Brent is the new Director of Operations
2.) Tenya McCampbell is the new SOLO Parenting Leader
3.) Jason Dixon is the new SOLO Homo Leader
4.) Ed Thompson is the new SOLO Fitness Leader
5.) Thomas Blackburn is the new SOLO Missouri Leader.

New SOLOHQ Features:

The Forum front page should look a little different to you these days. It used to display all the forums organized by date of creation. As we've increased the number of forums, it got a little confusing. I've now reorganized them by category. There's a General Interest category, which includes the General Forum, Dissent Forum, Objectivism Q&A, and the Banter board (which is a private, SOLO members only general forum where you can let it all hang out). We have the Gallery boards, like Polls, Articles, and Quotes. We have the Interest Group boards, like SOLO Food and SOLO Parenting. We have Local Clubs, like SOLO Florida and SOLO UK, and we have a list of Special boards, which includes boards that don't quite fit into the other categories.

I've also updated the Staff page.

We've added two new local clubs.
SOLO Kansas
SOLO Missouri

SOLO Feature review:

On the "Spirit" page, we sort the different galleries in a number of ways. One ways is by rating. So if you're interested in seeing the highest rated articles for instance, go here.

Activism:

Want to help take over the world? Here are some simple ideas you can do to help.
1.) Take this time to contribute money and help pay for SOLOHQ. We take credit card.

2.) Write articles.

3.) Bookmark our Amazon referral page http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/importanceofp-20 so that we get a percent of Amazon's profits from your purchases. Lots of people use Amazon, and if you use our associate program, we benefit at no cost to you. You can right click on this link and "Add to Favorites" or "Bookmark this link".
4.) Put www.solohq.com in your email signature file. It's an easy way to spread the word about the best Objectivist website on the planet.
5.) Do you have a webpage? Add a link to SoloHQ.com. Also, add a link to our Ayn Rand page at http://www.solohq.com/ayn_rand/ayn_rand.shtml and our Objectivism page at http://www.solohq.com/Objectivism/. These improve our Google ranking and make it easier for young minds to find passionate reason and rational passion on the web.

Statistics:

Articles on SOLOHQ: 1146 (45 this month)
Forum posts on SOLOHQ: 38,800(4600 this month)
Author Count: 141 (5 new authors this month – Katdaddy, Casey Fahy, Heidi C. Morris, Michael F. Dickey, Tom Rowland)
SOLOHQ Members: 1317(153 new members this month)
Page Hits: 471,000

Discuss this Announcement (1 message)