Roles

Its a pleasure for me to announce the following new roles that will be filled by members of this site.

diverian is now a forum moderator. Moderators are watchful of forum activities and manage the posts to ensure that they are appropriately categorised and worded. They may call to order discussions if it becomes necessary. They also guard the forum from spam and are there to assist other members in whichever possible. Should you have any issue with a post, simply click on the "Report to moderator" link that appears on each post and fill in the short form to report it (you may also do this if you are having difficulty uploading pictures, for example). All moderators and administrators receive a copy of this report and whoever gets around to to it first will respond accordingly.

Serious tribe will be managing the VE photo competitions which will be starting again. He will lead the relevant forum threads associated which each round of the competition and oversee the galleries for these. A continuity of themes will be ensured, and rules and objects of each round will be defined. As mentioned elsewhere, we are considering getting these rounds to the stage where prizes can be won. Note that he himself will be eligible to submit his own entries where applicable. The voting and rating of the photos is something he cannot tamper with. These can only be changed by manipulating the data directly in the site's database and only I have access to that.

On a note of interest, the site template for the upcoming software upgrade will allow for easy rotation of the header banner. This banner will be a photo which will be rotated regularly, much like the current Facebook concept. We will attempt to incorporate the competition photos with the banner rotation if this works out.

JonWells is looking after our annual Snow Watch threads. He will keep them updated with all available info, posting labelled satellite pics after each snowfall and maintain a proper count and brief analysis of each event (note that a summary list of snowfalls for each year is maintained and added to in the first post of each annual thread). He will also ensure that our Maloti-Drakensberg Facebook page is also updated with snow events.

All three have been active VE members for longer than 5 years and I appreciate their ongoing enthusiasm and interest in the site!

I anticipate that more roles will be assigned in the future, as there is certainly scope for it. This will ensure the site can run smoothly even if I'm not at my computer and will contribute significantly towards its long term sustainability. This will also free me up to attend more to administrative needs, nurture new projects and also to write more content.

Good stuff, well done guys, we'll try not to give you a hard time

Looking forward to the software update

I'm very happy to announce that JonWells and Smurfatefrog will be working as "Topic Managers" on this forum, which is a specialised moderator role to manage VE's special topics.

These include Snow Watch (which JonWells has already been managing), Dragon's Wrath, Berg Alert, and the quarterly photo competitions. Some other forum topics will also be considered to see how they can be managed better, such as the "official" threads for each pass, and others.

diverian and myself are still here as moderators too, though should we be unavailable and you have some technical issues with the forum, they will also be able to assist if they are around.

I'd like to thank JonWells and Smurfatefrog (both long-standing and regular members of this community) for their contributions so far and for their willingness to help out in alleviating VE's work-load. We all do this in our spare time. Please show them your support!

While I'm on this, VE's advisory team is currently diverian, tonymarshall, domsmooth and myself, which is a group that looks after the bigger picture, including VE's decisions and directions. They act as a valuable sounding-board and I'm grateful for them.