Hi all, how's everyone doing?

I've been a bit quiet in the news lately trying to get the ads sorted out (still ongoing), writing tutorials and trying to catch up on emails and approvals. I would really like to get back to the 3 – 4 queue time we had going, but I've been struggling with a 10 day queue time Christmas. The reason? Traffic and submissions are going UP! So it's a mixed blessing I suppose, and I'm determined to get it all under control, just taking some time. And before you post it, no I won't be getting anyone to help me process the submissions

In terms of stats, P2L now receives over 27,000 visitors a day and goes through over 13 GB of bandwidth a day. To date we've had almost 50,000 tutorials submitted to the site and we currently have almost 26,000 live tutorials! Since we released P2L v3 in August, we've processed over 14 million searches and over 40 million tutorials have been viewed since the site was launched 3 years ago. We may not be Slashdot, but that's some very impressive numbers and I'm really proud of where this has been and it's continued growth.

In the coming months I would like to focus our development team on going through the support forum and beta areas and start fixing any lingering bugs or half finished features that has been untouched for awhile. I know a lot of you have been waiting for the auto-submit API to be completed among other things, plus I have a fairly big list of quirks I'd love to address, so if you have any additional bugs or problems, make sure you post them in the support forum. I'm going to be working closely with Nick and Jaime to see what their schedules are like and see how we can address these problems, and look at possibly bringing on someone to help out with the coding. If we do end up needing someone, I will contact those of you that have already expressed your interest to help out in the past, and if I still can't find someone, I'll be sure to post a want ad

I'll also be looking at closing up the tutorial FFA forums now that all tutorials should be published in the P2L Publishing System. We'll keep old threads open so people can still comment and post their questions on tutorials that have already been posted, but we suggest to everyone they look at re-posting them in the Publishing System. The tutorial request forum will of course stay open so people can get ideas for new tutorials or you can ask for help on how to do stuff.

People have also been asking me about when we're doing a new contest because of that other thread where I was asking about what kind of prizes they would like to win. Well at least 1 big contest is still on the way, but my hands are tied until goodies like the desired gaming consoles are readily available on the market. I'd also like to get some of these bigger issues off the plate and out of my head so I can plan some cool contests and not just go through the motions and wing something. If we're going to be giving out sweet prizes, the we need to have a sweet contest!

And finally, I would like to offer a hearty thanks and round of applause to the staff and the tremendous job they have all been doing on a consistent basis. They all work very hard to keep the forums and index clean and I can not thank them enough for all the hours they put in. They all deserve our thanks for the work they do on here 24/7, way to go guys!

Ooohh… and one final note. Those of you that have been requesting a chat. I am currently in the process of testing out a very nice Java based chat script that ties in directly with IPB that has all the chat components you are used to seeing in IRC. If all goes well with the test (I am testing it on another smaller forum I run), I am very seriously thinking of adding it to P2L.

That's about it gang, be good!

Dan