June 28th, 2011 Update

Greetings all!

Some quick updates while I have a few minutes of time. I am pleased to announce that we have finally have a designer for the new IRCnewbies.com website in place. This is thanks to Tranced on DALnet. His girlfriend is going to be the one that’s doing the site, and his friend will pick up the pieces on area(s) that she’s not certified in. Since this has the potential to save a lot of start-up costs, when the website is completed, I have made the decision to possibly link to the DALnet network with a server representing IRCnewbies.com. We have chosen newbies.pa.us.dal.net – this not only allows new users to remember /server newbies.dal.net, and the pa.us is due to where the server will be located.

More news – olyd88, Tranced, and dragonlair have all been brought on our DALnet team, and if they accept, will be joining the IRCnewbies.com team on various projects.

We have a few channels now established on DALnet; #CyberAngels for internet security, chat, and general assistance. #Beginners is our main help channel, and we also have two default mIRC channels set up – #TeenFactory (for teenage users of course, and #mIRCSupport, which is another help channel set up by our team.) This channel was recently passed on to me from tyrant, we have some high expectations for this channel.

ABN has been doing a great job within the IRCnewbies.com team, and I have to admit that I can not be more pleased on who I chose to help me with this project. It’s definately more work then I originally thought it would be, and I know that in the long run, it isn’t something that I can do alone. Speaking of staff, we have chose to remove Roi_Scorpion, BetterMan, and Arch from the IRCNewbies.com team. We have no hard feelings against these three individuals. We merely understand that they are focusing on their promotions, and status on the Webnet (WebChat/Webmaster) community. Again, we wish the best of luck to the three of ya! You all better do me proud as opers on Webchat, just remember who’s footsteps you’re following in!

This is just some of what we’re going to attempt to have on the IRCnewbies.com website. I hope I can remember it.. (I’m not at home).

1. User accounts, each user will be able to create a profile. Here you’ll be able to have your age, sex, location, networks, channels, websites, nicknames, etc.

2. Forums: Forums for questions, comments, suggestions, links, etc.

3. Channels: Channels (which will have java connections available) that are recommended by The IRCnewbies.com Team.

4. Help Library: An interactive library, in which users will be able to contribute help files for others to view, and even download.

5. Contests: Extra money generated from ads, etc for IRCnewbies.com will go to pay the hosting and what-not. Any remaining funds, we will hold various contests for our members. These contests will have various prizes such as gift cards, instant cash payments (via: paypal), t-shirts, etc.

6. IRCnewbies Store: The IRCnewbies.com store will provide coffee mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, mouse pads, etc.

7. Vhost(s)/BNC’s: Staff will all have the @staff.ircnewbies.com vhost, certain members will also have vhosts available.

8. News Room: News from the various IRC networks, our team, mIRC, World News, USA news, etc.

9. Classes: Classes on various IRC topics. We are even working on setting up videos for the classes to make them more interactive, with a live chat taking place in the channels.

10. Newsletter: Once a month newsletter for members. The newsletter will have various sections, and we will even be setting up a form for users to submit news, and what-not to contribute to the newsletter. We hope to make the newsletter as interactive as possible. We are also going to allow channels to take about their channel, websites, etc.

I think that’s enough for now. I will post anything that is important that I forgot about. I will have more news in the upcoming 2 weeks, so keep checking back! Also, IRCnewbies.com has officially hit 2,200 unique hits for the month of June. I can’t believe how many people are actually taking a liking to the project. I even got some great feedback from Mark (The owner of the Webnet (WebChat/Webmaster network). As the fourth of July approaches, we want to remind everyone to stay safe, and let us know of any exciting events that you have planned!

June 10th, 2011

Well, the weather has been amazing the past week or so, and I have been extremely busy! I will be moving the website to the updated version here before long; I hope. I have been putting together a great deal of files, and am still working extremely hard on getting things back in order. I have decided to remove a couple people from the team, there are a couple reason(s) as to why. The first being, well some just weren’t needed at this point. Second being, with things lagging around here, and taking more time than anticipated, they just merely have lost touch, and I need staff who will & can keep in contact with me, even if it’s just a quick email, memo, or what-not. The third being, I’ve decided to just go with a couple great, hard-working, kind, and most of all knowledgable staff members. When the time is right, I will add new staff members, however they’ll be chosen based on activity.

A couple of the members who I had working with me have been promoted on Webchat’s chat network. Though they show constantly above 15,000 users, I know from being a CSOp for quite some time, that it’s a lot of idle bots, and what-nots. They seem to want to improve themselves on the network and work their way up the ranks there. I have nothing against that to be honest, and I wish them all the best of luck. However, with that said, I have been through the ranks, and I consider getting this website completely finished as my ‘project’ and reputation. Once everything is going well, I know that they’ll regreat, or even attempt to start putting in the time to become apart of our elite team, but this time, it’ll be too late.

Okay, now some quick news.

1. I am going to do a twitter account for IRCNewbies – this way people can follow easier. I have to admit, I am probably one of the only people who have never used twitter, but I am going to check it out. I have heard good things about it, and millions of people use it. I just never had a reason to, so now that I have one, I’ll get to it.

2. All the channels on webchat (webmaster – irc.webchat.org) are now back to normal help & chat channels. I have decided not to use them as a linked help channel to IRCNewbies.com – mainly because they’re slower since we’ve not set everything up, and second of all I just don’t have the time, patience, or dedication to training and getting the ‘Chat Operators’ all registered and what-not on the site. It was more of a pain in the rear, then something worth finishing. So there ya go, you can chat, op, etc in the channel(s) without even dealing with this site.

I personally haven’t even been on the forums for a couple of weeks since I don’t know what I want to do with them. I’m thinking of running the forums directly linked to the webpage, however I’m not quite sure if I can just transfer all the current accounts to the new one, so I’ve layed back a little on em. We’ll see in the future. However, you can & should still register at our forums, we’re growing in the numbers, and they can be beneficial & helpful to you.

Okay, now something I am excited about. I was checking the stats & such (through wordpress) and I was surprised to see how many unique hits IRCNewbies.com had got for the month or July. The only advertising of this website is through dalnet & webchat. I keep it in my ‘real name’ section of my whois, and word-of-mouth. With that alone, this wordpress site had nearly 1,900 unique hits for the month of May – like I said, kind of exciting. When I purchased the domain (after waiting years), the site really didn’t have a value, and wasn’t worth much because of how long it sat, and the hits were down. I did a little searching, and got the site appraised – IRCnewbies.com is now worth a little over $1,000.00 if I were to sell. (That’s one thousand, not million!) Though a thousand isn’t a lot of money, it shows me that I am slowly getting everything in the right direction, and if I can implement everything I would like to, who knows where the value would go!

However, just because it’s worth that much money doesn’t mean I am going to sell it. I didn’t start this project to become ‘rich’. Yes I see/seen how much the owner of webchat (webmaster – irc.webchat.org) makes, and seen his private plane and such. Though that was part of the reason I wanted to start my own project; but not for the money part. I was tired of volunteering countless hours to a network that paid me nothing, not even respect. Even if my project was worth millions, I would never sell. Like I have said from the beginning, once everything is in place, and I do start to make some revenue from the domain and such, I will not ‘profit’ the benefits. I promise (and still do) that the revenue would be used for hosting, extra pop3 emails accounts, etc. Any money that is left over will be given away in several ways (gift cards, contests, etc).

I appreciate everyone who continues to visit the site, I absolutely respect those who are helping me out and expecting nothing in return. Hang in there all, there is a light at the end of this tunnel! THANKS!