In case you haven’t noticed, this Thursday, March 25th, is the first anniversary of Brews Brothers' founding. I remember sitting in the passenger seat while we were driving down the Ohio Turnpike, furiously working with cell modem and laptop to get the details of the new board worked out. It was a fun and exciting time, and I’m thrilled to see that the community has stuck together as well as it has.First of all, I’d like to thank the moderating team for their help in maintaining the high standards we’re shooting for on this forum. Without your dedication and humor, this place would be a lot less interesting. I also want to give a special thank you to Ret S. York, our technical guru, without whom we’d be dead in the water. Heck, we never would have gotten off the ground in the first place! Every one of these guys volunteers their time here, and I for one really appreciate it. :covreyes:I’d also like to thank all of you, the membership. This place exists for you, and its content is created by you. It’s you folks and the community that you’ve created that were the impetus for creating this board in the first place. Thank you all for creating a fun, informative, supportive, and interesting place for all of us. :cheers:When we started the board, initially there were no user fees. We shortly changed that to create two levels of users, patrons and members. For a small $5 annual fee, you too can edit your posts! The intent was to build up a fund to pay hosting fees, and I’m happy to say that this effort has been quite successful. At the time, I stated that it was my intent to give any excess funds back to the community, and now is the time to follow through on that.I have purchased four $50 gift certificates to
Brewmasters Warehouse, and Ed at Brewmasters Warehouse has donated four more $50 gift certificates. Starting March 25, we will be giving away one gift certificate a day to a random member of the board, until they are gone. The first four drawings are open to all registered users that have logged in within the last two weeks. The last four will only be open to patrons. Winners will be sent a PM with the gift certificate code.A HUGE thank you to Ed for his very generous donation!
Many of us have been somewhat concerned about the slow attrition of the membership of the board, and the fairly low activity in the brewing forums. Our total traffic is actually slightly up over the course of the year, but there is certainly room for improvement. Over the next couple months, we are going to test using some cheap Google advertising to try to generate a bit more traffic. I have no idea how effective it is going to be, so we’ll keep an eye on it and tweak things as necessary. If you start to see more new faces than usual around here, that is likely why. So put your pants back on (at least for a little while) so as not to scare off the newcomers. :wub:Along similar lines, you may or may not have noticed that Brews-bros.com still does not show up very well in Google searches. Obviously the content you already create helps, but more is always a good thing. One thing that I would like everyone to consider is helping to produce a more robust review forum. We have interesting product review threads in the Public House, but how about making them more formal and putting them in the review forum? Not just beer either - how about that whisky, scotch, rum, or wine you tried last night? I think with the variety of tastes and interests here, filling up that forum with information would be very helpful to the membership, but it would also likely give a good set of keywords to generate Google hits.We’re always open to suggestions. If you folks have any ideas on how to improve the place, we’re certainly open to hearing them. Just to avoid repetition – making new skins is hard and we already tried a wiki for recipes. I guess in reality, we’re open to any suggestions but those. :sarcasm:Here’s to another good year!
Many of us have been somewhat concerned about the slow attrition of the membership of the board, and the fairly low activity in the brewing forums. Our total traffic is actually slightly up over the course of the year, but there is certainly room for improvement. Over the next couple months, we are going to test using some cheap Google advertising to try to generate a bit more traffic. I have no idea how effective it is going to be, so we’ll keep an eye on it and tweak things as necessary. If you start to see more new faces than usual around here, that is likely why. So put your pants back on (at least for a little while) so as not to scare off the newcomers. Along similar lines, you may or may not have noticed that Brews-bros.com still does not show up very well in Google searches. Obviously the content you already create helps, but more is always a good thing. One thing that I would like everyone to consider is helping to produce a more robust review forum. We have interesting product review threads in the Public House, but how about making them more formal and putting them in the review forum? Not just beer either - how about that whisky, scotch, rum, or wine you tried last night? I think with the variety of tastes and interests here, filling up that forum with information would be very helpful to the membership, but it would also likely give a good set of keywords to generate Google hits.We’re always open to suggestions. If you folks have any ideas on how to improve the place, we’re certainly open to hearing them. Just to avoid repetition – making new skins is hard and we already tried a wiki for recipes. I guess in reality, we’re open to any suggestions but those. :cheers:Here’s to another good year! 
