Springtime news 2017

Hey there, fellow wikiloops people :)

Let me offer you some news from the wikiloops engine room today,
I've been superbusy lately and must admit I have procrastinated on the blogging end a little, but then again, that puts me in the nice situation to have quite a lot of good news collected for you:

For the sake of this being the projects logbook, let me start by documenting that we have just passed the [b]"100.000ths upload to wikiloops" milestone[/b] a few days ago, and with an average of around 80 tracks uploaded per day, wikiloops is growing faster than ever.

Much of what has been reported here in the past has been dealing with the constant growth of wikiloops, and how to keep up with the constantly increasing technical needs, maintenance jobs, moderation tasks and the budget needed for all that, and we are continuing our mission to offer one of the coolest places for musicians on the internet.

One major key to keeping wikiloops on track has always been to listen to what the users have to say, and I'd like to thank all of you who have taken part in the survey we've run at the beginning of 2017, and those who take part in the open feedback forum.
Once again, we have listened carefully, and if 99% of the wikiloops users say [i]"we like the fact that there is no competition on wikiloops, please keep it that way"[/i] (as the survey revealed), then we'll certainly not ignore clear positions like this exemplary one.

So, after "touching ground" with the members in the survey, we are getting to work on making sure that the fun can continue on wikiloops,
let me just share a quick list of things that are in the works in spring 2017:

[b]Teaming up[/b]
As some will know, wikiloops was initially started as a hobby project which I started in the evening hours while working full-time on some other job.
In the course of the past six years, this has changed to the point where I have been working full- and overtime on wikiloops for more than a year now, with some happy weekend escapes to play a few gigs.
I guess it is quite easy to foresee that my day will not have enough hours to continue wikiloops this way thinking that we'll reach the 250.000ths upload quicker than expected, so here we are teaming up on wikiloops in 2017.

In a first move (and after coding a week on the needed features to be able to do that), we have added four [b]new moderators[/b] to the team, thanks to Shi, TeeGee, DannyK and jmrukkers for volunteering time to help on the various community management tasks!
Second, i'm quite happy to announce that wikiloops will offer a [b]practical work placement[/b] for the first time, an internship for a member who happens to be a student in a course in technichal writing, during which we'll be restructuring the help section of wikiloops.
Third, and also for the first time in wikiloops history, I have dared to hire a second guy to work on the codebase of wikiloops.
Ibrahim is a [b]professional webdesign freelancer[/b] and will focus on carefully improving the visual part of wikiloops and in improving my CSS-skills.
Just to talk with the guy already changed my perception, and I'm really looking foreward to see things evolve and improve.

So, for the fun of it, this is what the current 2017 wikiloops "organigramm" looks like:

Quite an impressive list of 14 heads for a small hobby project I'd say, and the volunteer-list could have been easily extended with some more beta-testing and bug reporting users who have been very helpfull.

Never the less, [b]wikiloops could do with even more help[/b],
be it in the form of donations to cover the expenses, or be it by helping us promote wikiloops to more and more musicians.
We certainly can't afford any fancy advertising campaigns to promote wikiloops, so we've always been relying on people who spread the word by sharing links online or by inviting musicians to check out wikiloops right on the ground.

In that matter, I'd love to supply anyone interested with small [b]free promo-packs[/b], consisting of wikiloops stickers & invitation cards (on which's backs you may note your wikiloops user name so your contacts can find you on WL),
if you'd like to order such a package, feel free to send me your street adress by message, and I'll get it on the road to you.

Well, so much for today, I guess you can tell we are aiming to keep the 'loops around for the next X-thousand jams to come, and I think I'll start next week by creating the folder "wikiloops 10.0" in my development drive.

Thanks again to all who are backing up the effort, you know who you are <3


As always, the stat record of today:
78.767 public tracks
47.018 members registerred
2.138 active uploaders
341 supporting members