(Image courtesy of http://www.firsthdwallpapers.com/)

Good afternoon everyone, and I'm delighted to announce on behalf of site management that, yesterday (Sunday 4th August 2013), was North East Buses' first birthday. As I'm sure you'll agree, the site is evolving constantly, and for those of you that haven't joined within the last month or so, you'll know just how far the site has come and how development of the site is a ongoing effort from all members of the community. Although the site's management team may contribute towards the creation of new features to the site, it is the community that help these features thrive. For those of you that joined a year ago, you'll have probably seen about 50 "forum facelifts" (as I now call them), and I can guarantee that these cosmetic changes will continue until our next birthday (at least!) to ensure that the site and forums look perfect and functions with little problems.

As part of our expansion plan which came into fruition approximately three months ago, I am glad to say that within the next few days, our first Fleet News report will be issued. As part of this update, we are pleased to announce that Scott Cooper (tyresmoke) will join the Forum Team. Scott currently manages North East Bus News; due to work commitments, Scott's weekly updates have been difficult to achieve. North East Buses - as regular viewers of Scott's website - realised this, and invited Scott to "merge" with our website to provide bi-weekly "official updates" alongside other Fleet News Reporters for the three main bus operators within the North East: Arriva North East, Go North East and Stagecoach North East. We hope that this will ease Scott of pressure on his website (which he manages alone), where he will now only cover fleet news for independent operators within the North East on a regular basis, while being assisted by other North East Buses Fleet News reporters for updates on this website.
At present, we will not provide official fleet news updates for independent operators. If Scott chooses not to renew his domain when it runs out, it is possible that he will either revert to a free domain name or that he will "merge" once more to North East Buses (which will presumably have grown even further by the time that happens). For now, however, normal discussion can continue on the forums for these independent operators; official fleet news, as well as fleet lists, will be provided on Scott's website.

North East Buses' fleet news section will work slightly differently to the current fleet news issued by Scott on his website. Though we have not made a concrete decision just yet, we anticipate that each Fleet News reporter will cover one bus operator. With myself covering Go North East, and Scott likely to cover Arriva. It either means we both need to manage Stagecoach or someone else also becomes a Fleet News reporter. In addition to managing the Fleet News, it is possible that they will also manage their respective operator's fleet list too. Instead of hosting the images on our server, we aim to collect most of the images from Flickr so that they will be hosted there instead. As normal members of Flickr now have 1TB of storage space on Flickr, we don't expect these images to be deleted. This also means that we shouldn't need to contact the respective authors of the photograph as we are providing a thumbnail of the photograph which, when clicked, will link to the photograph on Flickr itself. As we average on 500+ unique hits per day, this should result in a nice "reward" or "thank you gift" from North East Buses to the author of the photograph on Flickr - hopefully giving them a further 100-200 hits on the photograph itself.
More updates will be provided on the forum at a later date, and I hope to edit the "Fleet Lists" page later today after speaking to Liam so that we can provide another link to the Fleet News here. It's a little outdated anyway, as we have provided a link to the Metro fleet list on there!

Finally, we welcome Adrian (aureolin) to the forum's moderation team! To ease pressure on the administration team who presently moderate as well as administrate, Adrian's name will now show in a different colour and he can decide using his personal judgement whether a post has overstepped the mark or not. Adrian is a valued member of the community, and has proven that he is extremely dedicated to North East Buses. Whether he's striking debate in the continually growing "Quality Contracts" section or starting up a new topic of conversation elsewhere in the forum (perhaps in a place that is less used than other parts), he endeavors to make North East Buses a better website than it is at present. He will be an asset to the forum team, and I'd like to congratulate him on his new role and thank him for all the hard work he has done for NEB.