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I want start with another reminder of our new "Contribute" page for those of you who may want to help keep video ads off of the website. The response so far has been very gratifying and we are very thankful for those who who have supported us.

Today marks one year since I started writing the "most active threads" series. So, I thought that I would take a moment to revisit the origin of these blog posts. Back in 2007 when we moved to this website platform after two years of using another, my vision of the home page blog was that it would be a place for DCUM users who have an interest in writing to contribute blog posts. A communal blog for DCUM posters, if you will. That worked okay for a while with a small group of writers offering regular articles that kept the content fresh and interesting. But, slowly, those authors moved on to other endeavors. That left me as the primary contributor and I was often pressed for time or, more often, simply out of ideas. As a result, the home page content grew stale. Often it was little more than republished press releases. A year ago, the most recent post on this blog was nearly 10 months old. Moreover, we were at the beginning of what would be a seemingly non-stop decline in advertising revenue. Among the advice I received from advertising partners was to keep content fresh. "Surely, that is not a problem for DCUM", I thought. "Our content changes every few minutes if not more often." But, that was the forum content, not the home page. So, I stretched my imagination to its limits — obviously a very short horizon — and came up with the idea of writing about active topics on the website. If popular threads would provide writing prompts, I could write about anything, I believed. My goal was not to attract readers — indeed I couldn't imagine why anyone would read such posts — but only to appease Google's search engine and algorithm. The result was my first post in this series. Originally I also posted on the weekend but eventually stopped that in order to give myself a break. But, outside of weekends I am pretty sure that I have posted every day except the day of my brother's funeral and the day we drove our younger son to college.