BookTalk.org News: 4/3/2009
BookTalk.org News: 4/3/2009
* Last call on non-fiction book suggestions and feedback for our May & June 2009 non-fiction book selection. There are too few suggestions and absolutely no feedback on the existing suggestions. We need the next poll to go up soon so this is your final opportunity to help us select the books that will go on the poll. As a rule we place more weight on the book suggestions of active members with over 25 posts on our forums. This established rule maintains the integrity of our book selection process. It doesn't take long to get to 25 posts.
* Saffron & Interbane have joined the BookTalk.org Moderator team! Frank, Tara and I are excited to have their help and guidance. You'll find Saffron as the Moderator of the "A Passion for Poetry" forum while Interbane moderates the "Belief, Religion & Philosophy" forum. The whole community appreciates your contribution.
* Check out the new "Shoutbox" in the right sidebar. Directly below the scrolling "Recent Topics" block is a new block called a "Shoutbox." Feel free to experiment with this new box by making brief posts that everyone can read right on the home page.
* Usernames are now clickable. To the left of each post where you see the post authors name the username is now a link to their profile. We should have done this years ago, but now it's done.
* Indie and I are working on a few things to make our chat room a more prominent feature on the site. This Shoutbox is a small piece of the puzzle. You can use it for tell people to meet you in the chat room, as an example, or for anything else you want to shout out. Also, you will note that the Shoutbox is really just an invisible forum. Click on the "Click here to read all shouts." link to see the shouts in forum format.
* Our chat transcripts page has been made a lot more attractive. We will soon start doing live author chats again so it was essential to fix up our transcripts index page.
http://www.booktalk.org/transcripts.php
* Donations are much needed right now. Everyone seems to love the new sidebar Shoutbox, but a few people have had issues with the refresh rate and with scrolling. So we're working on swapping out the current Shoutbox with a better "Ajax" Shoutbox that doesn't refresh the page or iframe. Don't worry about what all this means, but understand that the problem isn't fixed yet as it is taking too much time/money to fix it. So far the Shoutbox has cost over $100 and there is more work needed to figure out a solution. Any donations would really be appreciated.
* We need to bring live author chats back on the menu. The real issue is that we're now reading far more books as a community than I can personally keep up with. BookTalk.org has simply grown very fast the past several years. This means that many of the books that would make for great live author chats are not ones I've read. And if I'm the host of a live chat I'm not going to do a very good job without having read the book. Make sense?
So I could use some help. If you would like to have a live author chat for one of our book selections please bring it to my attention by making a post in the BookTalk.org News & Feedback forum. I'm going to ask you to find two other active BookTalk.org members that will pledge to read the entire book, contribute to the book discussion, and then actively participate in the live author chat. I just can't do it on my own and am asking for a tag-team approach. If we have three people helping host the live chat then we'll have no problems even if one or two of them back out the last minute. Of course, if they back out we won't be quick to schedule another live author chat with them as a host.
I'm heavily considering inviting Christopher Hitchens for a live chat about "God is Not Great." I'm reading this book so don't have concerns about my ability to host, but on other books/authors I'll be asking for assistance. I'll make a post about this potential author chat in the "God is Not Great" forum.
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