Helper Of The Month (HOTM)
Congratulations to Dan Bayley, aka DanInManchester for winning the October 2004 HOTM. IT's been a long time in coming and is well deserved. I was sure Dan would have won it a couple of months ago but each of the last few months another vbCity member has come roaring up the through the user rating charts and beaten Dan to the award.
.NET Fella
This month the nominations for the .NET Fella award were the most open for quite a while. There was quite a lot of discussion in the vbCity moderator forums about who should get the award and until, literally, the last day of the month it was not obvious who was going to win. However, we felt that despite a number of other nominations CanOz deserved the award for his contributions not just this month but over the past year. Neil has also posted a number of FAQs and is a regular contributer to vbCity's newsletter. I know from personal experience that putting together FAQs and devCity newsletter articles is a time consuming business. Anyway, congratulations to Neil for winning the October 2004 .NET Fella Award.
Other News
Although I missed 2 weeks of the month due to a holiday I have soon caught up on most of the happenings in the vbCity environs. Brent has also been missing for the last part of October but we hope to see him back real soon.
One minor change for the formatting that has been introduced into vbCity is an improvement in the quotation text format. Quotation text now has a gradient background and no longer has a four sided border. I wasn't convinced that it was an improvment at first but I am slowly being won over.
Serge has also put out a request for vbCity members to send him a postcard from their home town. I have bought & written mine. I just need to get the stamps and actually post it! Hopefully get that sorted by the weekend.
A big thankyou must go out to Chris who volunteered to work on the FAQ queue and has kept on top of the number of outstanding FAQs. That in itself is a major task but combined with the number of questions Chris answers and the amount of time he spends at vbCity his contribution at the moment is awesome.
In any month we get a number of duplicate posters or the odd poster who doesn't follow the vbCity community spirit. The vbCity leaders handle these as part and parcel of the responsibilities of being a leader and hopefully the majority of the vbCity members don't notice. This month the leaders had to put a gentle stop to the political dicsussions about the US presidential elections. They were getting a little heated and out of hand. Obviusly some people feel very passionatly about these things whilst others of us couldn't care less ;-) The one thing to always remember is not to let your personal feeling take over from extending the common courtesy to other people at vbCity and on occasion this was forgotten. Anyway it's all water under the bridge now and as the elections are over hopefully feelings will simmer down a little :-)
A lot of discussion in the vbCity moderators forum has been about a new project we are thinking about introducing. No definite decisions yet but expect an announcement by the end of the year. Suffice to say it is something the vbCity leaders are all very excited about.
At the end of October we had a total around 331,000 posts and 133,100 registered users at vbCity.
And last but certainly not least congratulations to LazyJay and Rock who were made Microsoft VB MVPs.