Over the last two or three months, we've seen explosive growth in both discussion and membership here at BOTC.  Back in August, we had only about 50 total members, and if I got more than one or two comments on any post I wrote, it was a good day.

Now, two new bloggers and a coaching change later, we have almost 120 members and almost every post draws several comments, minimum.  Open game threads draw hundreds of comments regularly.  For all this growth and improvement, I really must thank all of you readers, old and new alike.  Also, many thanks go out to the new bloggers, Panjandrum and EMAW.  They are working hard, providing great content, and really driving the discussion.

I wanted to use this post to give you notice of a couple features at BOTC that I think will help improve the experience even more.

Mailbag Posts

On the left sidebar, we have email addresses listed for both TB and Panjandrum.  If there's something you want to see discussed, or you have a story idea, or there's some issue that you don't think we've noticed, please send either or both of us an email.  You can reach me at bringonthecats @ gmail.com, and you can reach Panjandrum at ksu.panjandrum @ gmail.com.  We'll do Mailbag posts as often as we have enough emails to justify doing so.  Also, we won't use your real name unless you tell us to do so.

FanPosts

Many of you have noticed and used the FanPost function on the right sidebar.  If you go to the bottom of the FanPosts, you'll see a link to "All FanPosts."  If you click on that, you will see a message board-like listing of FanPosts.  You can also toggle the settings.  You can all use this to bring up items you want to discuss amongst yourselves, whether or not we get around to it on the front page.

As always, when we see particularly noteworthy FanPosts, we may bump them to the front page to make sure they get noticed.

Recs

At the bottom of each post and each comment, you'll see the word "Rec."  By clicking on that, you can notify other readers that you have recommended that post or comment for their viewing.  If posts, FanPosts, or FanShots get enough Recs, they will be featured.  It's a great way for you to point your fellow readers to things you consider particularly interesting, well-written, or insightful.

Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, Facebook

At the bottom of most of our posts, you will see logos representing the above three distribution groups.  By clicking the logos, you can signify to the distribution groups that you think the post is noteworthy.  In turn, those distribution groups will feature the posts that get a lot of clicks, which drives traffic to the site.  This is more of a self-serving notice, but the more traffic that comes to this site, the more likely we are to continue to increase membership and improve the discussion.  I submitted this post for distribution so you would see what I meant, but please don't actually vote for this post.

BOTC Mobile

If you have a Smartphone, check out the mobile version of BOTC.  Panjandrum travels quite a bit, and has wiled away many hours at America's finest airports reading this site.

Above all, keep doing what you're doing.  I love this site because we've maintained a civil level of discourse without fear of saying what we think.

Go Cats!