Each month I try to post a personal review of what happened at vbCity during the previous month and this month is no exception :)
Helper Of The Month (HOTM)
Congratulations to Arnaldo Sandoval aka rock for winning the March 2005 HOTM. This month was another really close contest between Arnaldo & Ben Spencer, aka Spebby. It was literally neck and neck untilthe last few hours when Arnaldo managed to win by only about 10 posts or so.
.NET Fella
Congratulations to David Wilburn aka doWhileSomething for winning the March 2005 .NET Fella Award. David is one of out more recent members , having joined within the last 6 months. David is already creeping up the HOTM list and I think it may not be too much longer before he is vying for HOTM!
Newsletters
Just one devCity Newsletters was sent out in March, on March 10th. We are always on the lookout for people to write articles for our newsletter so if you would like to get involved please contact Ged Mead, aka xTab
vbCity sends out a community newsletter email once a month, usually around the last week. All registered vbCity members can choose to receive it by going to their profile, selecting preferences and then ticking the Yes, send me monthly Community Update mailing checkbox. You might notice some items from this post appear in the newsletter!
Site News
Serge added a few new facilities for the moderators this last month. These were mainly providing statistics about vbCity like top .NET posters etc. Serge opened up a real can of worms when he gave us these and asked us if we wanted any others. He now has a long list to check through :)
Serge also introduced a new forum, .NET 2005 Beta so that there is a specific place to post queries about .NET Framework v2 and VS 2005.
Leader News
Each month our resident genealogist, Wonkotsane digs up some fascinating and little known facts about our new leaders and this month it was the turn of rock, aka Viscount Arnaldo
Just to prove that occasionally the vbCity leaders do have a life outside of software & vbCity Chris Manning, aka betrl8thanever was away for a short while on a recent deep sea fishing trip.
We also lost Arno, aka breakfast3001 for a few weeks whilst he spent some time taking his exams. The good news is that Arno passed with 78.6%. Well done Arno.
Another of our younger moderators, Robert aka xterra made a welcome return to the moderator's lounge after a long absence. Robert promised to pop by a bit more regularly and we all hope he'll stick to his promise :)
I also hope Richard, aka rjhare enjoyed his holiday at Burnham-On-Sea. Just before Richie went on holiday he found time to meet up with fellow vbCity leader Stuart aka wonkotsane, and ex-vbCity leader Tim aka edward. Stuart posted on his blog about the Meeting Richie & Edward
For more info about the leaders have a look at the vbCity Blogs where some of us are blogging.
Other News
One of most popular post in the vbCity Lounge Forum was Things that have irritated you today!, a thread that simply allowed our members to vent out what sort of things had been irritating them during the day!
The vbCity Introduce Yourself forum continued to be popular and has provided an excellent insight into some of the vbCity member's other interests. I found David Jeavons entry particularly interesting. David is currently quite close to the top of our HOTM list but I knew relatively little about him until this post.
If you haven't already entered our Free Competition where 3 full developer licences for Dockplus are up for grabs. Full details of the competiion are available on the Olvio web site, DevCity.Net Competition for PlusDock 1.0. I've certainly entered and the deadline has been extended to April 10th!
From The Archives
Each month I'm going to try and bring up an interesting thread from the vbCity archives. This month I thought I'd mention, Do you have an inney or an outey?....Bevel border, that is!!. I would imagine this is a thread known to most of the regulars at vbCity who have been around a few years but may not be known to some of our neweer members. I never knew Amy Owen who started the thread as she left vbCity before I joined but I did know the other two main contributers, Jeff Lingis breifly and Edward Moth (aka Tim Dutton) fairly well. To me, this thread is all about what vbCity is all about. A good discussion on a topic with some friendly banter and amusing inuendo thrown in for good measure.
At the end of January we had a total of around 393000 posts and 139000 registered users at vbCity.