Here is your periodic update on what is going on at RootsWeb. As Listowner, I feel it my duty to report these statistics to users of the Lists I manage, and which are hosted by Rootsweb. Below is the monthly update by Brian Leverich one of the founders of RootsWeb. PLEASE look at the figures and try to imagine that much genealogy email traffic!!!!! And, it doesn't cost users (subscribers) a dime! We Listowners do have to pay a modest fee to have our Lists, but other than this small requirement of us, ALL other funds for operat- ing expenses comes either from voluntary contributions from users, or out of Brian's and Karen's pockets. Look through all the figures and pay particular attention to the part near the end on how you, as a user, can contribute to the world's best genealogy service. A dime a day (that's 10¢) would cost you only $36.50 a year; a nickle a day would cost you only $18.25 a year. Heck, even a penny a day would cost you only $3.65 a year. I figure that I have something like 5,000 subscribers to my 12 Lists (some of them have very few users), and if each of you could spare $3.65 a year, that would amount to $18,250.00 per year for RootsWeb. A penny a day doesn't seem like much, but $18,250.00 would go a long way in helping support RootsWeb. BTW, this fiscal year, Brian and Karen figure they are going to run about $56,000 in the red. Guess where that money is going to come from? Not from us! From their pockets! One other thing, the server IS secure and you don't have to worry about using your credit card over the Web/Internet when dealing with RootsWeb. I've done it for a long time and have never had a problem. **********(Start of Brian's Monthly Statistics Update)********** In July, RootsWeb experienced one of its largest single-month increases in load with folks using many of our services 25-33% more than in June. We're not quite sure why that happened, but we speculate it's because we've been adding new features and upgrading our servers as fast as contributions allow. We also suspect that the new RootsWeb Review e-zine may be helping folks find new parts of RootsWeb. Here are the detailed statistics on our July operations: o 2,975 independently-Webmastered Websites are hosted by RootsWeb. o 50,245,222 total Web hits: - 13,608,736 were HTML pages. - 6,879,675 were cgi-bin database searches and such. - 29,568,584 were graphics (gifs, jpegs, etc). o 995,249 FTP file downloads from the USGenWeb Archives and the ROOTS-L Library. o 3,967 independently-listowned mailing lists are hosted by RootsWeb. o Thanks to a neat hack by Tim Pierce, we know we shipped 99,934,614 pieces of e-mail to our mailing lists. o 60,000 alt.g and s.g.* Usenet News articles to hosts on three continents. o Approximately 830,304,000,000 bytes in total. As always, RootsWeb remains supported by user contributions. Folks who would like to become a RootsWeb Member or Sponsor (the cost is very modest) are invited to visit: http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html *** You can become a Member easily using your credit card and our new secure server. *** Support from the Internet genealogical community is *crucial* to RootsWeb's operation. Right now, we could be hosting many more Websites and mailing lists as well as providing many further services to the community, if only we had the resources to do so. Also, we would like to publicly thank Palladium Interactive, publishers of the superb Ultimate Family Tree software, for their support of RootsWeb: http://www.palladium.net/ Thanks to everyone who participates in RootsWeb -- clearly folks are continuing to exchanging a great deal of information! -B -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 [email protected]