Once again it's time to cobble together a quick note, mostly to extend very grateful thanks to absolutely everybody who has contributed to the web site over the past 12 months.

Without you all this site wouldn't be possible. It's been a pleasure developing and maintaining the site over the past four years, and meeting so many great people on events and trips, and I look forward to much more.

It's been absolutely fantastic watching the site continue to grow and seeing the range and sheer quality of contributed photographs and documents from members and locations from all over the country and latterly the world. The collected pool of knowledge that's out there is incredible, and most of you have forgotten more than I'll ever know ;)

A few people have asked for some up to date statistics, and so here they are, as of around 6pm today 31st December the site has:

Members: 4,684
Mines: 13,883
Albums: 33,503
Photos: 38,887
Votes: 4,679
Documents: 744
Dictionary / Lexicon entries: 304
Forum: 50,768 posts in 3,531 threads
Pages: somewhere in the region of 250,000 generatable pages

(don't ask about the disc space or bandwidth!)

A few specific thanks:

To the Regional Editors who maintain the Major Mining Regions

AdrianP (South East England)
Barney (Midlands)
carnkie (International)
Colonel Mustard (North West England)
Ferret (South West England)
Heb (Scotland)
ICLOK (South West England & South Wales)
Imageo (International)
Jimbo (North East England)
JR (South West England)
Manicminer (North Wales)
Mr Mike (North West England)
Peter Burgess (South East England)
Roy Morton (South West England)
royfellows (South West England)
sparty_lea (North East England)

And to the other admins, Vanoord (who puts up with me complaining when the site seems to go quiet!), the Colonel, Merddinemrys and Barney.

But as the opening paragraph said grateful thanks to absolutely everybody who has contributed to the site over the past 12 months. Your time, effort and generosity in contributing to this site through exploration and archive photographs, all the discussions, documents, and everything else throughout 2009 has been, and continues to be, very much appreciated; by the site admins, by all the other members and by the thousands (literally) of people who visit the site every day.

Looking forward to 2010, to more explorations, meeting more people on more meets and of course to continuing to evolve and work on the web site and seeing more great exploration and archive material appearing.

I shall definitely be getting to it and arranging the next 12 months events and trips as soon as I can!

Happy new year everybody!

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And thank you for maintaining this site, which of the few that I contribute to on a regular basis is the only one where anyone has gone to the trouble to post a message like this. It is a reflection of the fact that I find this the friendliest of the sites I use, and where members show most respect to each other. Long may it continue, and Happy New Year to you all.

I agree with Peter 100%. Couldn't say it better.

:thumbsup:

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