The BlogShares Blog

Mod-A-Thon:
So the GIC guys were gung-ho on the Mod-A-Thon plan and had high expectations for it. I don't think anyone could have predicted that almost 20,000 votes would be modded in only seven days time. The opening relay went around the clock and around the world, and started the Mod-A-Thon with about 6000 votes moderated in the first 24 hours. We had dozens of moderators kick in time to deal with the bulging vote backlog, and the GIC members themselves spent dozens of hours administering and modding as well. There were numerous competitions within the Mod-A-Thon, including relays and endurance events. RUSerious modded for 24 straight hours at one point to win the endurance challenge. Thank you, GIC, moderators, and contributors to the prize pool. This effort was so successful, we may just have to do it again (insert collective groan from the GIC here).

Basketball:
Congrats to Bruce Wayne for winning the 2006 NCAA Tournament Bracket Challenge. In our Blog Madness competition, we've crowned Georgetown and its associated blog, View From The Hilltop, as our BlogShares National Champion.

People and Site Updates:
* In order to concentrate on site documentation and tutorials, GIC member tengrrl is shifting roles to fill a spot as a BlogShares Editor. All the tools and permissions are up and ready so she can get things done easier.
* To replace tengrrl on GIC, former Index Manager Nick has been tapped and is already in the process of getting up to speed on the team's work.
* We've put a cap of 30 owners on any given blog. If you attempt to gift to a player, and there are already 30 owners, the gift will fail. This solves a bug in transactions on blogs with dozens of shareholders.
* You can now view up to 20 available artefacts on blogs instead of the previous limit of 5.
* Artefact Holder Rankings are now available, and the Top Chip Holders rankings have been expanded to show 100 players.
* All users can now see the BSID of blogs on the blogs.php pages. BSIDs are the unique numbers assigned to blogs which enable faster lookups and data storage. Suburban Wolf instituted these as one of his first major changes to the code way back in 2004, and they have been visible to Admin and some role players since then.
* On ideas.php, we've added a sortable 'Blog Count' column to the table as an often requested feature.
* MrPilot updated the GIC button and added one for the Editor role as well.