As a voluntary financial contributor to RootsWeb (and that's all other than a grateful recipient of it's fine services) I'm posting the following to discussion lists to which I subscribe. It's an excerpt of the weekly "news letter" sent to contributors and is being posted by me with neither request nor authorization of RootsWeb. I do sincerely hope each of you who reads this post will genuinely ask yourself about the value of RootsWeb to you and act accordingly with voluntary financial support. John Tallman Lookout Mountain, Tennessee _____________________________________________________________________ NEWS AND NOTES FROM ROOTSWEB ROOTSWEB IN OCTOBER -- 61 million hits and 117 million e-mails! Need we say it? RootsWeb has continued to grow. While we are more than pleased by our growth, it is forcing us to upgrade our servers and increase our bandwidth, which in turn severely strains our limited financial resources. If you would like to help RootsWeb grow, please consider becoming a RootsWeb Member or Sponsor. Information about how to do that follows the statistics. Here are the detailed statistics on our October 1998 operations: o 3,264 independently-authored Web sites hosted by RootsWeb. o 61,205,731 total Web hits, of which - 16,107,975 were HTML pages; - 9,252,813 were cgi-bin database searches and such; and - 35,844,943 were graphics (GIFs, JPEGs, etc.). o 1,223,214 file downloads from the USGenWeb Archives and the ROOTS-L Library. o 4,686 independently-operated mailing lists hosted by RootsWeb. o 117,570,146 pieces of e-mail shipped to our mailing lists. RootsWeb is supported primarily by users like you -- your contributions keep us alive. If you would like to become a RootsWeb Member or Sponsor (the cost is very modest) please visit: <http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to- subscribe.html>. Support from the Internet genealogical community is crucial to RootsWeb's operation. Contributions that we can employ to upgrade our servers are essential for us to be able to continue bringing more genealogical Web sites and mailing lists online. . . . thanks to everyone who participates in RootsWeb. Clearly folks are continuing to exchange a great deal of information. * * * ROOTSWEB DOES NOT SELL ITS MAILING LISTS. RootsWeb received the following letter last week: "My company, PARADIGM List Management, has developed an expertise in the marketing of information (registered customer databases, online subscribers, names with postal addresses, and e-mails) that is sourced from the Web. We market this information through traditional marketing channels for direct mail & targeted e-mail purposes. We currently represent many high profile sites in this capacity generating a significant source of incremental revenue for the sites. Who can I contact at Rootsweb to discuss our services?" ### Dr. Brian Leverich responded: "I'm one of the owners of RootsWeb, and it is true that we have extremely clean mailing lists for hundreds of thousands of Internet genealogists. "It will be a cold day in Hell before we sell that information to anyone, though. We take the privacy rights of our users *extremely* seriously. Cheers, B."