30,000 Posts: An EMTBravo Update

[EMTbravo 312]

On Wednesday, this board struck 30,000 posts. As of this moment, we has 30,108 in 5,286 topics made by 2,984 members. While marking this event, I'd like to take the time to update you on the site.

Some brief stats for the site.....the month of July 2005 was the busiest time ever for both EMTBravo.com and EMTBravo.net Incident alert continues to be the most popular and most visited portion of the forums, and all the other forums do tremendously well.

I hope you are growing used to and growing to like the new board. If you notice, the board is located at a new domain, www.emtbravo.net . We are continuing to tweak it up and roll out new features. Next month, a new version of the software that this forum runs on will be released, and I think you all will be happy with some of the improved features, including a more dynamic and interactive "My Assistant" and improved post read handling.

We are also working on several projects to fund the operation of this site, as it is expensive to operate. We will be adding a feature that will allow you to "subscribe" to this forum in the near future, on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. We are also currently researching limited advertising/sponsorship of the site. Finally, we are in the development phase of a long awaited and long requested t-shirt.

And the redevelopment of EMTBravo.com, the flagship photo site, continues. We hope to premiere the new EMTBravo.com sometime in the early winter.

On a down note, complaints still continue to be heard as to why EMTBravo.com is not updated frequently, and "why aren't my photos posted yet". Just wanted to throw in that we do the best we can to present content you want to see. I try as hard as I can to update as much as possible....which is difficult sometimes between work, travel, and personal obligations. Updates also take quite a bit of my time....For example, the latest update, 901's photos of the Mount Vernon Regional Hazmat Drill, took me 2 1/2 hours to do. That's partially because each photo is hand reviewed, hand selected-in this case from a pool of over 300 photos that 901 took that day, and manually edited. Then the photos are uploaded, and the page is written, by hand. Hopefully, the new site will streamline and make some of this process easier and faster, as well as make the site easier to navigate, but nothing will replace the effort that is put into making sure only the best is posted in the best way possible for you.

As always, any questions, comments, concerns, ideas, thoughts, complaints, anything at all....feel free to email me at EMTBravo@EMTBravo.com

Thanks again to all of you who make this site what it is. Now I'm going out to ride my bike and get some fresh air and excercise!!!

-EMTBravo and the EMTBravo Webteam