This is just a little different than the typical "RFG Thanks for (insert month/year)".
I was going through some of my old blog entries and I found one I wrote as an open letter to the community. It was written 3 years after joining, but a mere 2 months after I really began to get involved with the community.
As I sit here now, my son is playing Pokepark on the Wii as I look at my TI-99/4A that I need to test so I can sell it. There have been a lot of changes for me personally as well as for the site in the time since that blog post. I have gone from grabbing everything in sight to being selective and selling off stuff that I have just to have it. I'm now a director on the site. We had a pretty big disaster on the site that easily could have been the end of the site potentially. I recovered what I could with what I had, losing a couple of years worth of forum posts and maybe 6 weeks of database submissions.
The forum was slow to come back, but here we are. We have a bunch of new members and old members who have returned. We have new bloggers and a new podcast. We are nearing in on 70,000 software entries and 5,000 hardware entries! We have a new server with more power and drive space for us to grow with! And we have continued to do so with just the support of the community and their donations. We have no plans to be sold or put up ads.
We're doing this on our own. I see and hear things happening elsewhere that I never want anything to happen here. We want you to communicate to us and let us know about any issues you have or any ideas to make things better. Together, we'll continue to get better as well as grow.
What this all boils down to is... thanks. Without the passion of the community, we wouldn't be here. Thanks to the bloggers for writing about your perspective. Thanks to all of the staff for your work on keeping that submission queue low. Thanks to everyone who was here before me who started the site right. Lastly, thanks to every member for making this a great place to be, day after day.
