Our website took almost 3 years to reach the 1,000,000 mark, and as of today, (only a little more than one year later) we're a little over 1,951,000 and climbing rapidly.

THANKS TO ALL OUR VISITORS FOR MAKING US MORE POPULAR THAN EVER.

Bob

I wonder how many of these hits are from idiot spammers? I have to delete several dozen user name registrations on the site from these bozos every day.

BTW - if anyone has been trying to register and had no success, send an e-mail to webmaster@aoas.org and tell me what e-mail address and username you tried to register with. I'll be sure to approve your user registrations.

Well there may be a lot of spammers, but an event is an event, and I'd even like to thank them for helping us reach 2,000,000, too. Just kidding, Dave....heck I know that my own prolific use has added probably as many as 50,000 or more events by myself, but FYI, there's only a little over 14,000 events before we bust through that 2,000,000 mark in the next few days.

It's interesting to me that I see little things in the last 6 months to a year that gives me encouragement that we're beginning to make a bigger difference. I hear visitors at our bi-monthly star parties mentioning that they've been with us in the recent months for other events, and I get a fair amount of feedback in my email as well. Education and Public Outreach are important to AOAS and we take it very seriously. I hope everyone will keep checking back on our website and keep coming back to our star parties, as well. We appreciate everyone who comes to visit for any reason.

And BTW, Thank You, David Grosvold, for keeping our site as good as it can be and for EVERYTHING else you do in helping AOAS grow!

Bob

First, I want to congratulate our webmaster, Dave, for the outstanding job he has done making our website one of the top astronomy sites out there. This is certainly one of the reasons that so many keep checking out what we have posted.
But, I also agree with Dave on the fact that so many of those hits are spammers.
Even though I have my e-mail set at its highest setting to stop spam, my AOAS mail still gets 10 to 20 spams a day. One of their latest means of trying to get me to open their mail: they list the mail coming from Bob or even from myself. Luckily, most of these have arrived under Junk Mail. This makes it easy to just do a fast
Delete of the entire list.
Great job Dave!
Chuck L.

Sometime yesterday, or perhaps on Wednesday we blew past the 2,000,000 mark. After just checking the stats at 3:00am this morning, we now have had 2,010,283 events. Not bad, huh?

Its not known whether there have been even 1,000,000 individual visitors to our website, but we've likely passed that benchmark even with all the spammers who don't care where they've landed whenever they surf. That's okay by me. I've probably ditched at least a million spam messages in the nearly 10 years since first sitting down and making that initial sojourn into the World Wide Web, or even into that minuscule magnetosphere of the little hard drive on an old girlfriend's computer who first allowed me to try it.

How long will it be until we see the 3,000,000 mark? I'd rather not speculate, personally, but I fully expect it to be in a shorter amount of time than it took us to get our second million. Regardless, keep checking back often, and help us reach that next milestone just a little sooner.

Thanks everyone!
Bob