In January, we sent out an email call for help. We have been so encouraged by the response! We had so many members come forward to offer their time and effort that we had to scramble to get everything in place. Volunteers are now active in the areas of New Member Guidance (Tour Guides), Book Image Collection, Book Descriptions, Website Editing, Marketing and Games. {We are still interested in finding PHP programmers to help Robert with his ENORMOUS To Do list of improvements he plans to make to the site…if you want to help with this and are an accomplished PHP programmer, please send Robert a message from the feedback area.}

Our Tour Guides are a mighty and powerful group! Each new member is assigned a Tour Guide automatically upon joining the club. The Tour Guide introduces him or herself by email along with a Personal Message. Tour Guides are doing terrific work, answering new member questions and helping them learn the ropes. If you are a new member, for goodness’ sakes, take advantage of your Tour Guide if you have a question about how to use the club–simply log into your account and click on your Buddy List on the right-hand side. Your Tour Guide’s name will already be there, and you can click the button to send a Personal Message. Remember, the more of these questions get asked of your Tour Guides, the fewer that we have to answer in Feedback. Not that we don’t love to hear from our members, but answering too many Feedback each day pretty much eliminates the chance for us to do anything else for the site. So please, check the FAQs or ask your Tour Guide first! Tour Guides: You all are our PBS Ambassadors, and we thank you for your patience and energy. You are doing a super job!

Our Image Collectors have located and uploaded thousands of images to the database to replace those ugly blue “Cover Not Available” eyesores. Our Website Editors are working hard to correct all the inaccuracies in the database. You can help both of these groups in their efforts by submitting any inaccuracies you find. If you have an image of a book cover to upload (to replace an erroneous one, or to provide a graphic for a book that has No Cover Available on its book details page), simply scroll down to the very bottom of any page on the site and click Upload Book Covers. You don’t have to do anything special to the graphic files–simply make sure they are “cropped” (no white or black border around the image), and they are good to go! If you find a text inaccuracy (ie, paperback listed as hardback, or wrong title or author of a book), you can also submit the correct information by scrolling down to the bottom of any page on the site and clicking Edit Book Data. Enter the ISBN of the book and make your changes to the book information on the next page. Submitted images and book data corrections will have to be reviewed by the volunteers before they can be added to the database, so the change won’t take place immediately. Thanks in advance to anyone who does this–improving the quality of the database improves the club for all!

Thanks to ALL our volunteers–we are touched by your generosity, and grateful for your hard work. If you would like to volunteer, simply send in an email to Volunteer@PaperBackSwap.com.

Tags: Members, Tour Guides, Volunteers

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.