Five weeks. Just five weeks. Here's what you magnificent people have been doing in the five weeks since pitchers and catchers reported:

• We’re up to 1100 registered members, and nearly 500 of them have contributed to the community.
  
• The forum holds 500 discussion threads that have generated over 5000 individual posts, or about 100/1000 per week.
  
• 321 individual blog posts by our members on 62 blogs, or about nine every day.
  
• Those have been read by 34,765 unique visitors who have stopped by 134,000 times.
  
• Last Thursday we had 621 people visiting the site all at the same time.
  
• And finally, the benchmark that drove us to do this research: over half a million page views.
  

The goal of this site was to make it easier for Twins fans to find great independent Twins writers and thinkers. But having 35,000 people discover posts and blogs of hundreds of our members over half a million times in a little over a month? I’m pinching my PC screen. This can’t be real.

So again THANK YOU all for coming together and doing this. PLEASE: read, join, post, write and share with your friends. You have something to give. We’ll do our best to make sure we do our best to help people find it.

Time for a couple of important notes…

Ads

You’re going to start seeing ads on TwinsDaily. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. For a community to thrive, it needs to be able to pay for itself, and all this activity (not to mention the initial investment in the web site) costs money. Ads are the last cornerstone to keep this community self-sufficient. It also reflects how thriving this community is - nobody advertises where there aren’t people. We’ll try and keep them from being overwhelming and hope you’ll support them the way they’re supporting all of us.

By the way, the implementation of those ads might not be totally seamless. We’re feeling our way through this thing. As always, let us know if you think we’re screwing up.

Spam

The spambots have found us. Every morning Nick, Seth, Parker and I scour the site trying to stay on top of them, but it’s mostly reactive. So if you see one we’ve missed or haven’t found, please click on “Report” and we’ll get on it (and ban the user) as soon as we can.

Play Nice

Communities do a lot better when people show each other a level of respect. So we’re enforcing no vulgarity and no personal attacks. If you find a post that you think violates that, rather than lash out yourself, report it to us.

Avatars

Finally, let’s all get avatars, ok? Here’s how:

When you’re logged in, click on “Settings” in the upper right hand corner (or here.)

Click on Edit Avatar on the left-hand side.

Thanks again everyone. As always, let us know your thoughts below or in the Questions About Twins Daily Forum. I don’t know exactly how the Twins season is going to go, but I’m sure glad we found each other and can share it together.

Honestly guys, this site is great. Almost as good as the MLB Twins site, maybe better. The site is packed with the latest information from both the regular bloggers and the comments. Thank you for the time and efforts put in by all who have contributed. And GO TWINS ... and GO RED WINGS too (grin).

I am really loving this site. I'm checking it more and more often every day.