Back for some more Blogging Action!!

Hey guys!! It's the manager of your space-time continuum, The Ellimist!!

...But you can call me Adam. Most of you know me already, but in case you don't, here's a quick re-cap of some stuff i've done on RAF:

1. Joined way back when... (a long time ago)
2. Became a staff member on RAF Classic
3. Subsequently became a Co-Admin on RAF Classic (helping Richard out with a few things)
4. Brought Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant to RAF (to answer some of our questions)
5. Donated money to RAF (its a good investment)
6. Posted on RAFBlog! (right now)

But enough about me. More about what my blog posts will include. My blog posts will most likely include updates from Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, as I am in contact with them regularly via e-mail. Actually, i'm trying figure out a new way of asking them questions, like maybe ask everyone for their questions, RAF's Staff sort them out (get rid of the silly ones), and then I e-mail the completed list to KA & MG. I don't know!! Haha! Just an idea, i've got tons more too!!

If you have any ideas, please either tell me in comments (Estelore would probably like that), or PM me. Either way i'll read it and consider it, and maybe even reply. But Please... Don't give me questions. I'm not ready for them yet.

Thanks for reading!!!

My regards,
Adam, A.K.A. Ell¡m¡st

A Proposal: RAF Silence Day #2

Right, well, folks... I'm still uber-curious about Richard's appearance, in all honesty, and this blog post is already a day late, so let's get to business.

I suggest we re-attempt RAFSilence Day. I suggest that we try to do this next Tuesday, since Tuesdays seem to be our non-busy days.

Commentary, if you please?

Richard, if we can pull it off, even belatedly, will you still agree to post a picture?

*shrug* I think it's worth another shot.

-Estelore

Animorphs Trivia Game

Have you ever wanted to test out your knowledge of the Animorphs book series against your fellow RAFians? If you're interested and wanted to discuss the idea further, click on the title of this blog post and you can post in the thread I made in the Animorphs Board!

Recent Email Sent + Rank Changes

As I said on Twitter, I sent out an email to every member who has no posts: just to remind them that we exist. Below is the screen-shot of that image for all you guys who are not newbies:


Oh and to facilitate this new email reminders I have changed the member groups/ member ranks a bit. "Newbie" are now members who have only 0 posts. The new group "Non-N00b" are for those who have 1-9 post.
See here for more information.

Warm Feeling Inside

First, I want to preface by saying I don't actually use Yahoo! Search. I was just going there to see how we are fearing on their search engine. To be fair though, 12% of those who come to RAF in the last month came from Yahoo! (versus 83% from Google).

Anyhow, when I started to type "animorphs forum", this is what popped up:



And I got a warm feeling inside. So I wondered, would the same thing happen on Google?


Apparently not :(

Get your act together Google! :)

The A is for...umm...something about Animals right?

Hey guys, I’m back with another random post about nothing really all that important. Sorry about this. Don’t worry it will be over soon, you can just leave a reply saying hey good point and pretend like you read it. I would honestly never know.

So anyway; Richards ANIMORPHS Forum. I think most of us notice that the Animorph’s board is one of the least active boards on the forum. The common trend is for new members to start in the Animorph’s board and gradually move over to the general categories. The veteran members are rarely seen actually talking about what brought us all together; Animorphs!

Some people find it hard to believe that an Animorphs forum is active after almost 10 years. You can really only talk about Animorphs for so long right? After a certain point the discussions start to repeat themselves. The newer members will bring up a great point that you talked about seven months ago. After awhile they’ll start to feel the repeat of the discussions and they’ll drift away from the Animorph’s board too.

But just because most of the discussions of the board have been done in one form or another, that doesn’t mean we should give up on them. There will always be fresh perspectives on the books that we all love. For every “Thoughts about book #54” and “What would be your battle morph” threads, there will be a unique idea out there that makes the Animorphs board worth checking out every once in awhile. (I just read “The wall between Jake and Cassie” and thought Hylian Dan made some great perspectives on their relationship.)

So to sum up what I’m trying to say (because my posts are never clear enough to pull the message out without an idiot proof conclusion) we should try to bring back the Animorphs discussion to the forum! Check out a few of the new discussions and try to see if you can get some new perspectives on the series. Reassess the points of the series you love or that you questioned and maybe you’ll find some new discussion topics too. Terenia should be commended for organizing the group reread; a weekly reread of the series in order. Not a bad idea. Revisiting what brought us to the forum in the first place might bring us closer than ever.

But we should be proud that if the Animorphs discussion isn’t what has kept us together for so long, it means that e have survived solely on the community we have created. RAF FTW!

Bending Life Around RAF...

...and not the other way around...

I wonder how many of us actually adjust our schedules specifically to be able to access RAF.
I, for instance, wake about fifteen minutes earlier than necessary for that specific purpose.

Does anyone else here do this? Do you stay up a bit later than you might, or put off any meals, or avoid IRL conversations for RAF?

Or does RAF have to conform to your life?

Please do comment. :)

-Estelore

Blog & Chat back up

After 24 hours of being down, both the RAF Chat and Blog are now up, and online. The reason why they were down is that XEHost, our service provider for both the Blog and Chat upgraded, and changed the IP address for the server.

Long story short, I also changed the IP, and now you're able to read this, and enjoy our chat room. If you were following me on Twitter, you would have seen a tweet saying I will move from them because of this downtime; I have decided to, because they did not go down, keep their services until it expires in a few months.

Edit: They apparently moved servers, and I failed to get the email, so some files have been lost. I'm definitely not renewing my plan with them. XEHost, you suck.

27 Days, 1 Million hits

While RAF Parties may be less populated these days, RAF is nowhere near slowing down. It was only 27 days ago that I blogged about RAF passing 4 million hits.

Today, the RAF Statistic Center total hits passed 5 million. The counter now stands at 5,008,725.

Continue to RAF; continue to Party!

Problem with RSS feeds

Hey RAFians and others. The RAF Blog RSS feed is down, not sure why, but I am looking into it.

March 5 update: Things seem to be up now. It was apparently a bug with Blogger.

Are You Ready to PARTY?

The monthly RAF Party starts at 12AM EST Saturday and ends at 12AM
Monday.

Don't Forget RAFSilence Day!!

Hey, folks! For this week's article, I'm just going to remind you all:


DON'T POST THIS TUESDAY!!!!

(or Wednesday, if you're in the Eastern Hemisphere)


If you want to see Richard's face, do NOT post on Tuesday/Wednesday of the coming week.
If you DON'T want to see his face... then please just don't spoil it for everyone else. :)

Happy Weekend, RAF! See you all Monday!
-Estelore

RAF Staff

I have recently noticed that sometimes all the staff members, with the exception of Ricard, get little to no respect. This has been going on for a while, some of the staff feel they get no respect and I myself don't feel like I get as much as I should have earned by now. I've been signed in almost 30 days of my life (thats only on new RAF). I've donated plenty time and hard earned money to make this forum what people love.

How is it that I feel like when I tell people to stay on topic its taken as a joke?
How come when I tell people maybe things are getting a little to heated or disrespectful to a singular member people ignore me?

Some of us have given up on trying to keep things tidy or under control because no one listens.

This is the start of something new, a new RAF staff. Disrespect will not be tolerated, warning will be fewer and punishments will be given out to people who don't listen.

By the way, 99% of RAFians are nice and discuss/argue politely. There really isn't much to do as a staff memeber here, we aren't tyrants, we dont tell you what to do.

All we do is try and keep things in order. Why not respect us? Why not treat us with respect?

Everyone from Richard, the CREATOR of RAF, to goom our jr. staff.

You have to listen to all of us, maybe you dont like it, but you have to. All we do is enforce simple rules and keep things organized. Is that so bad?

-russell/esplin-

What RAF really looks like...

We all know that inside the body is nothing like the familiar outside... so bad analogy aside, this is how RAF looks from inside.



Those familiar with SQL, you know what you're seeing... others, think about it as a big MICROSOFT EXCEL spreadsheet. It's the RAF Forum's Database.

Dusting Off an Old (kinda) Gem

Okay, so maybe it's not that old, but it's old by internet standards!

This is just a little poke in the side to ye olde RAFians that RAFipedia is still out there! To the newbie RAFians, allow me to introduce you to RAFipedia.

RAFipedia is a wiki about RAF, the RAFians and Animorphs. Please, check it out! http://rafipedia.wetpaint.com/

There, you can register, add information to the wiki and even add your own page to the Notable Members section. Let RAF know who you are! Check out some of the other pages and learn more about your fellow RAFians. Didn't know that one of Ken's favourite movies is The Matrix? Didn't know that Gaz loves The Count of Monte Cristo? Can't keep up with the latest RAFrelationships? Want to know more about the history of RAF? Well you can find all this information and more at http://rafipedia.wetpaint.com/!

Once again, that's http://rafipedia.wetpaint.com/.

C'mon, test out that nice, shiney left click button by clicking on THIS!

Or THIS!

And believe it or not, even THIS!

...Are you there yet?

Adam... now top Donator with 3rd donation!

"RAF Elder", Adam has once again decided he will not be outdone.
After claiming the #1 spot earlier in the year with his second donation... he has joined the exclusive club of those who have donated over 2 times.

Russell have donated 3 times. But he is now RAF's top donator.

Of course, this post is to thank Adam for his monetary contributions to RAF. After all, it's through these donations (and ad-revenue (which is meh if you ask me) that you're able to enjoy the RAFperience!

Feel free to use our PAYPAL system to contribute whatever you can & learn more about what you get from donating by clicking here.

PS: On the topic of RAF Donations, as I told Adam eariler, the system will be tweaked a bit in the near future

Year one: RAF eBooks - Stats

Your original source for Animorphs eBooks, made by members of RAF; RAF eBooks is now over 1 year old. Statistics show that from February 14 2008 to February 14 2009:

104,934 persons visited, &
363,730 hits were recorded.

In case you didn't know, since late last year, we have been working on Everworld and Remnants ebooks; the latter is complete. To get involved in Everworld ebooks, go here.

RAF Chat Smilies Codes Changed

On the RAF Chat, you don't have to remember some lame codes to get the emoticons (smilies), see the list below:

is now ;)
is now :lol:
is now :P
is now =)
is now :s
is now :Oo:
is now :D
is now =D
is now 8)

Thanks to Goom for the suggestions.

If you don't know what the RAF Chat is... then here we go: The RAF Chat is the area of RAF (Richard's Animorphs Forum) which allows you to chat directly with members and non-members in an instant message format.

If you haven't registered yet... what are you waiting for?

I hate blind conformity...

Conformity is the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are influenced by other people. This influence occurs in both small groups and society as a whole, and it may be the result of subtle unconscious influences, or direct and overt social pressure.

Source: The Most Reliable Source on The Internets

Well, I don't know where this post is coming from... well, maybe I do. The thoughts came to my mind after reading this post (more on that thread later). I know some have speculated that ChimichangaChupacabra is indeed old-time member Venom(sic). Maybe he is, maybe he isn't; that's not the point, but like his old profile, it is, for a new member replete with smites.

This isn't a venom/ C4 post, rather one which I'm just using him as an example. He clearly doesn't care what we think about his opinion; he gives it to us... hard. I'm personally all for that. After all RAF is a forum... a place where persons communicate with each other and discuss whatever they want: not a place where opinions get shot down, and discarded.

But the same must also go for the dissenter. One who doesn't agree with the general consensus shouldn't be quick to shut up the person they don't agree with. Well, on RAF I try to promote openness and community; so I would ask that we not be quick to discard the ideas of those who we don't agree. I can't tell you how you live your life... not even on RAF.

IRL (in real life) I am one of the biggest dissenters out there; that part of my personality though cannot merge with my RAF life simply don't join real discussions for fear of loosing what little objectivity we possess. It's a pity, because I really love debates.

Anyway, this is probably the longest personal note I've written here, so I should start hitting the "PUBLISH POST" button pretty soon, and get back to the mountain of work I have to do.

Purpose of this post? I'm not sure, but I just want to commend the dissenters out there who don't just do it to be not one of the 'cool guys', but those who actually think outside the box.

Daylight Savings Time - Update your RAF Forum Time

See here to learn how to change the forum's time.

Happy Spring!

Spring is finally arriving in the northern hemisphere of this lovely planet, and it means different things to each of us. Some of us are getting ready for spring dances, concerts, musicals, and other school events. Some of us are eager for the sports season to begin, and March Madness is about to hit the U.S. I'm very eager to get my garden and my private music lessons re-started. Just today we had our local music contest, for which I've practised all week with the kids I accompany on piano, and that's only the beginning of my 'busy season'. Graduation approaches for high school seniors. Final tests are coming up for kids in school and university. Life is getting to be very busy and down-to-the-minute for most of us.

Whatever spring means to you, it generally means that RAF will be seeing less daytime activity from many of its members.

That's the problem with having a life: you have to live it.

Well, happy living, folks. If you can blend IRL with RAF, then more power to you. You have more free time than I have, and I admire your dedication.

Bliss to you, my dears.
Yours Always,
-Estelore

Kanye West - Welcome to Heartbreak Video

So, to liven up the blog a bit, I'm going to open up, and begin detailing more about my life.

First up is Kanye West (the rapper's) music video. I think that because it's so innovative it's has risen to #3 on my favourite music videos of all time list.

See the links below:

Here is a the YouTube link. |