Recent News & Updates Regarding Anxiety Zone...

[GreyGoose]

Dear Members:

As many of you may have noticed lately, I am in the process of trying to obtain funding for the anxietyzone.com forum through various means. My reason(s) for this are simply to help defray the costs associated with the chat room (about $20.00 monthly), general hosting ($35.00 monthly) and various other expenses associated with this site. A donations account has also been set up and a link to it has been included at the bottom of this announcement.

As I do all of this though, it's important to me that I strike a very delicate balance and walk a very fine line. This is "home" to a lot of us (including myself) and I don't think any of us want a forum where invasive and annoying ads are splattered all over the site and pop-up windows are constantly appearing. This is why I want to be very careful and very sensitive as I go about this but unfortunately, at the same time, we are forced to live in world where things like hosting and other services cost real money and obtaining funding for this site provides a way to pay for some of these things.

As some of the "old timers" here may already remember, awhile back we had a very simple and unattractive chat room. It consisted of a single room where you couldn't really do much of anything and it was very slow and quirky (nothing like the one we have today). Then we had a donation drive here and within about 10 minutes, the donations came pouring in. In fact, I had to shut it down quickly to prevent any more donations from coming in once we reached our stated goal of a little over $20.00 (we actually ended up with $70.00!). Well, that $70.00 was used to pay for about 3 months of chat hosting and then I picked up the tab for the last two months myself (I have been paying for all of the hosting myself for over a year). So now we need some new funding and this is why I have chosen to seek funding for the forum again both through advertising and your generous donations.

I just wanted all of you to know what was going on and understand why you were seeing some of the changes that have been occurring lately. Thank you all for listening and for being a part of what has become a second home and safe haven for all of us .

If you are able to, please donate to the Anxiety Zone Community Fund now by clicking on the link below. No amount is too small and any amount will be used wisely and with great appreciation...

http://www.anxietyzone.com/az_donate.html

- Warmest regards, GreyGoose

[GreyGoose]

Dear Anxiety Zone members...

I am very pleased to announce that through the generous donations of people like YOU, there is currently (as of Jan 31, 2007 and after PayPal processing fees) $239.48 in the Anxiety Zone Community Fund. On behalf of all of us here, THANK YOU! .

How will this money be used?.

Thats really up to the members here to decide. Of course, a good portion of it will go toward the normal web and chat hosting fees next month and well beyond but I'd like to hear what new features and/or services YOU would like to see added to the Anxiety Zone forum. That's part of what the fund is for!.

Some ideas I came up with a few months ago were free blogs, enhanced 3-D chat capability (which would be in addition to the current chat room) or perhaps some service where you could create your own homepage here on the Anxiety Zone domain.

A few other ideas might be...

* Free (full-featured) member email accounts.
* Add-ons that enhance, improve or add new functionality to the forum (ie; a shoutbox, preview post on mouseover, mood icons, audible PM notifications, country flag in profile, etc).
* Replacing the current gallery with a much better one.

So please post your ideas and suggestions here in this thread and together maybe we can all make this forum an even better place than it already is and once again, thank you from ALL of us!.

- Warm regards, GreyGoose