First, the site continued to grow rapidly with our registered membership reaching 45,000. This has affected the performance of the site, and thus we shall move it to a new server yet again early next year.

This year we added the galleries and sort of integrated them with the forums. Unfortunately the server crashed this year (what a bummer!) and the gallery images apparently were the only things not backed up (my apologies to all, especially those who've had to repost their images). We just moved the galleries & Hippyland to their new home in the Netherlands where we hopefully won't need to worry about John Ashcroft, and his totalitarian fantasies.

The war in Iraq certainly was the news event of the year and it affected many of our members who took to the streets and the forums to express their feelings on this hot button issue. Fortunately we seem to weathered the debate well, with fewer trolls to spoil the day.

We added some new membership rules this year including the 100 posts till becoming a full member. I think that alone lent membership more respect, and helped people moderate their own behavior in order to "join" us. We plan more of these kinds of things, that we hope will get people more involved as a community. We can offer more roles to people than just member or moderator. Some of them will be very interesting, too.

But that's coming up. Thanks to the generosity of our members there will be a next year for the Hip Forums. This year's growth put us way over our bandwidth limit, but a mercifully short donation drive helped out until we can move the forums where our bandwidth expense will go down. Until now we have been using various hosting companies servers in 3 different locations for our sites. We might need more of your support to buy our own server to host these forums at the new location (I still don't have the quote yet).

I believe the forums will continue to grow and provide even more services and a higher level of interaction for our members. There's a lot of work to be done, transforming the forums into communities.

Are you ready for the next phase? Are you ready to be challenged? Want to "grow" along with the forums? There are no limits to what people can do with the right tools and vision.

I wish all of you the best of everything in the New Year. May the world be a more peaceful place for a change!