The Ravelry Army!

Dear Ravelers, We love you guys! -- Casey and Jess Jess and I owe A LOT to our wonderful users. I don't know how we'd do this without them. Most people don't know about the huge role that our users play in creating Ravelry and I thought that I would take this opportunity to explain. First of all - the donations. We are so grateful for all of the donations! We see each one as it comes in and we really appreciate each person's contribution. Without your donations, we would have a much much harder time getting this thing off of the ground. We started Ravelry on our living room couch with absolutely no funding and we are so lucky that you guys are helping to make this happen. Thank you! Now here is something that many people don't know - nearly 400 Ravelers have donated their time and volunteered to adopt and edit a section of our pattern and yarn database. Ravelry's giant pattern and yarn index (10,000 yarns, 13,000 patterns) is built with the contributions from each and every user. New patterns and yarns come in every day from people's projects, stashes, and queues and our editors make sure that the pages are correct, complete, and useful. Without their hard work and dedication, our database would be inconsistent, disorganized, and just not that pretty. People have been going above and beyond the call of duty - digging in libraries, calling up contacts, and going all Indiana Jones on the hunt for yarn and pattern data. Jess and I are so amazed and so thankful for all the hard work that our volunteer editors have been putting in. Also, a HUGE thank you to the sooper editors who wield the special powers that are too dangerous to hand out to hundreds of users. You've been doing a great job helping volunteers with their requests, answering questions, moving mountains, and cleaning up spills ;) Ravelry users can expect to hear from the editors from time to time. Often, you'll receive a message asking if it's okay for us to use your photo as the featured photo for a yarn or pattern. Also, you might receive a note with questions about a yarn or pattern that you've added. (Especially if you are a person who uses super rare yarns and out of print patterns!) If you decide that you too would like to volunteer, please stop by the Editors' Group and say hello. We'd love to have you! We also have volunteer bug/idea trackers who add bugs and suggestions that come up in the forums into our issue tracking system. This really helps me stay sane and it is much appreciated. I don't have to stress out about forgetting about somebody's bug or awesome idea and users know that they are being heard (even if I don't have a chance to reply, which I usually do). It's also cool because we now provide The List of bugs and ideas on the site. Thanks, trackers! And thanks to all of the beta testers who have shared some great ideas with us (and bug reports too!) I also want to say a big thank you to the folks over in the new Help! Group. Starting that group was a great idea, guys! - I think that new users really appreciate that there is a friendly place where there is no such thing as a stupid question. I'm also learning a lot from the questions that people are asking and it gives me ideas for improving the site. Thanks! And of course we have to thank ALL of our users for helping us grow. Using Ravelry means improving Ravelry - without you, we wouldn't have anything. The projects, patterns, yarns, groups, forum posts, wiki pages - everything exists because of you guys. We're so glad that you are enjoying our site and spending some time with us. Our lovely volunteer editors:

oh duh - I should probably post a status/waiting list update. Has everyone seen the list checker at http://www.ravelry.com/antsy? Good. We're inviting about 1200 people a week right now. I'm trying to speed things invites up, but I'm not sure if we'll be able to go much faster until we move out of our baby beta environment and into our Grown Up datacenter with our real servers. You guys have been very patient - I can't believe that it's been almost 3 months since we started the beta! We've still got a ton to do before we open to the public, but as we add capacity we'll crank up the invites. I'll post more information as it comes!

The Ravelry Army!

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