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As of now all posts made by members will count toward their post count, even in the off topic sections.

How long?
I don't know.

Why?
Well, Why not. We just do this from time to time with little or no reason. LOL

Enjoy.

With the help of our awesome staff and Premium Members the holes have been filled and out Official 2012 CU Calendar is complete and ready for printing.

The process for filling these orders is going to be manual this year.
We will collect orders thru Friday February 17, 2012 and I will have them printed.
I will pick them up from the printers and mail them to those who order between now and then.


NOTE: Orders after Friday the 17th will have longer lead times because I have to order them from a printer in Memphis, drive down and get them, and then mail them out. So, get your MEOW!!

I completed several projects tonight to get us looking better for the new year.

New Server
Zeta migrated our forum to a better server over the last week. We expect this server to have less problems than the one we were on. This should eliminate most all of the little bit of down time we have had. It will also help protect us from those pesky DDOS attacks.

Menu cleaning
I have cleaned up the appearance of the menu to make the board look less crowded and keep the menu on one line for smaller screens. In order to do this I have added Community and User Tools tabs to the top of the page. you will find links in there for your control panel, member map, handouts for recruiting new members, awards listing, etc. These menus will not be available on the mobile theme in order to help speed the site up for mobile users.

General cleaning
I have cleaned up some of the graphic inconsistencies left from other projects done during 2011. This will give us a better overall appearance with a "cleaner look."

Thanks System
Sad to say, but i had to kill the thanks System completely. This system has given us a lot of trouble over the last year as it has gone down multiple times, and even caused the site to crash once. The owner of the system has gotten tired of the issues and decided to stop supporting it. Personally I like the Like System better. LOL

Donations Button
Given that we are mostly member supported I have added a Donations button in the menu. This is for members that want to financially help the site out. Yes, there is an award for donating. Hit the button at the top to read more.

Mobile Speed
I have disconnected a lot of the lower priority functionality from the mobile theme for the site. This should greatly increase our speed on mobile devices. I will continue to look for ways to drive our performance in this area.

In addition to all the joy of Christmas we here at Cobalt Universe are also celebrating our 1 year anniversary. We went live on December 25, 2010 at 02:30 eastern time, and have been steadily growing this year to 430 registered members as of today.

Our Story in short
CU was born out of my frustration with the way the other major forums have been taking over by corporate ownership and turned into advertising machines. I was voicing this frustration to my wife one day when she told me that I should do something about it or shut the hell up. I have never created or ran a forum before, but after talking to her and Lonewolf I decided "Oh, what the hell" and, with their encouragement, have never looked back. We started out last Christmas day with 12 members frustrated from the feeling of being sold out by another forum. Within 5 days we were up to 61 members from that forum. We enjoy a good relationship with the Admin that runs that forum, and wish him all the best. The owners are another matter. I have not spoken to them since I resigned as a mod on their site and told them to go to hell.

Over the past year we have become a close knit forum of normal everyday folks. We do not subscribe to trim level snobbery, or faceless corporate ownership. We accept all from the base LS to the most tricked out SS. It has been a great ride this year and I am looking forward to seeing what the next year has in store for us.

I would like to thank our awesome vendors for their great prices and sales over the last year, the staff for all of their hard work and the Premium Members for their financial support without which this forum would not have survived.

Our Financials
Unlike other forums CU is entirely member supported. Our current vendors have not paid to be vendors, and CU has not received financial compensation from them to date. They put their financial support toward keeping their prices low for our members, developing new products for us, and supporting our members after the sale. The site is supported via the purchase of Premium Memberships and member donations. if you want to become a Premium Member, or you want to make a donation to support CU in 2012 CLICK HERE. Memberships are at the top of the page and donations are at the bottom.

Thank you all for a great year, and here's to an even better 2012.

As many of you know Lonewolf was one of our biggest and earliest supporters. In fact he is the one that encouraged me to make CU in the first place. He has been a very valuable asset to the site, and for a long time has been our unofficial lead moderator.

It has taken me a long time to come up with what I wanted to do to recognize the contributions he has made to this community, both as a contributor and a keeper of the peace. The title of "head moderator" or "super moderator" is played out if you ask me. I like to change things up and do something different.

Effective right meow I have created a brand new rank for Lonewolf... Sheriff.



Please join me in this overdue recognition.