Welcome to the BowlingFans.com's BowlingCommunity.com.

All the posts that follow will contain Important Announcements for BowlingCommunity.com Members.

Old announcements will be deleted when they become obsolete.

Please take a moment to read all the announcements if this is your first visit and don't forget to check this topic for new announcements on future visits.

Please Report Inappropriate Posts

If you come across a post on BowlingCommuity.com that is an advertisement, contains inappropriate language, is hateful, or otherwise violates our Community Standards please don't hesitate to click on the button below the offending post.

A copy of reported posts will be emailed to the BowlingFans.com Staff and Volunteer Moderators and if it is deemed to violate our rules it will be removed. All reports and any action taken is kept strictly confidential so please don't fear reporting a problematic poster.

Thank you for your contributions, your knowledge and your enthusiasm.

PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND TEAM MATES ABOUT BOWLINGFANS.COM AND BOWLINGCOMMUNITY.COM

Members Can Now Add Items To The Calendar
BowlingCommunity.com members can now add Bowling Tournaments, Bowling Camps and Clinics to our Calendar by posting a message in our Bowling Classifieds forum and checking off "List as an event in the calendar..." and don't forget to choose the date.

Please note: The calendar is for NONCOMMERCIAL use and bowling events only. We do permit Bowling Centers to advertise tournaments and Coaches to advertise camps and clinics.

BowlingFans Buttons for the Google Toolbar

If you're using the Google Toolbar 3 Beta for Firefox or Google Toolbar 4 for IE (and if you're not you're missing out!!) you can easily add a button to search BowlingFans.com and BowlingCommunity.com and also see every update to our RSS Feeds.

Just click on the link below to add it to your toolbar. Please try them out and if you don't find them useful you can easily remove the buttons in one click.

• BowlingFans.com (Button includes RSS Feed)
• BowlingCommunity.com (Button includes RSS Feed)
• BowlSearch.com

I also created buttons for Amazon.com and all of Amazon.com's stores. Plus using these help support BowlingFans.com!

• Amazon.com All Products
• Amazon.com Apparel & Accessories
• Amazon.com Automotive
• Amazon.com Baby
• Amazon.com Beauty
• Amazon.com Books
• Amazon.com Camera & Photo
• Amazon.com Cell Phones & Service
• Amazon.com Computer & Video Games
• Amazon.com Computers
• Amazon.com DVDs
• Amazon.com Electronics
• Amazon.com Health & Personal Care
• Amazon.com Home & Garden
• Amazon.com Grocery
• Amazon.com Jewelry & Watches
• Amazon.com Kitchen & Housewares
• Amazon.com Magazines
• Amazon.com Music
• Amazon.com Office Products
• Amazon.com Outdoor Living
• Amazon.com Software
• Amazon.com Sports & Outdoors
• Amazon.com Tools & Hardware
• Amazon.com Toys & Games
• Amazon.com Unbox Video Downloads
• Amazon.com VHS

EVEN MORE toolbar buttons are available on my blog!

Widgets For Your Blog

Add a free BowlingFans.com and/or a BowlingCommunity.com widget to your blog or web site.

The widgets display our RSS feeds which include the titles (and optionally a preview) of new posts.

See a demo here.

BowlingCommunity.com has been upgraded!

Here is some of the higlights of what's new or has been changed:

• Change: The following changes were made to the Text Editor:
  • Video button for YouTube and other embeded video players.
  • Smiley popup will no longer stretch to the skies imagination.
  • Popups now show correctly positioned in all browsers.
  • Aligned image bbcode is now much easier to discover.
  • The bigger/smaller images are moved to be vertically related.
  • Popups autohide when you click the textarea.
• New: New option on Active Topics to show Topics that do not have any replies yet.
• Change: Modified spoiler and list tags. Spoilers now have spoiler=Message and list tags now support list=(circle|i|I|a|A|1|disc|square)
• Change: The pagination code has been redone to make it easier to jump around forums/topics with multiple pages.
• Change: Abbreviated subjects on the cfrm/postlist pages will now show the full subject when hovered over.
• Change: You can now set your notifications to only notify you when a new topic is created, instead of for every post.
• New: It is now possible to just search the body of a post, excluding the subject.
• New: Emails are sent out in both an HTML and plaintext copy.
• New: When emailing a post, you will now get the option of emailing just that single post, or the post and all of it's replies as well.
• New: It is now possible to email a Private Message to yourself.
• New: Added the capability to email the entire topic to oneself.
• New: 'My Stuff' menu option to have it as either a drop down or as a left navigation menu.
• New: 'My Buddies' is back, but with more functionality. You can check multiple users, and then launch a PM to all selected (within limits). Multiple delete. View Posts and Profile from same screen.
• Change: PMs have been enhanced to additionally include: Emailing of multiple selected PMs as well as deletion.
• Bug Fix: Custom Titles are working and can be set again.

Attention: Accredited Bowling Professionals

Sorry this feature has been broken for awhile but it's FINALLY fixed!

If you have more than 10 posts on BowlingCommunity.com and would like your title (i.e. "USBC Gold Coach," "IBPSIA Certified Technician," "Touring PBA Pro") displayed under your Public Display Name on all your posts we'd be happy to set it up for you. (See sample below.)

• 

So we may confirm your accreditation and set this custom user title please PM me the following information:

1. Your real Full Name.
2. Where you're located (City, State/Province, Country).
3. Your certification or accreditation.
4. How we can confirm that you posses this accreditation. (Include a link to your bowl.com listing.)

This offer is limited to USBC Certified Coaches, Ritger Certified Coaches and BTBA Coaches, IBPSIA Instructors and Certified Technicians, Touring Pros, and current and former Team USA Members.

If you have several accreditations please pick only one to be displayed. Unfortunately, there is a limit on the number of characters that can be used and it gets too unwieldy to list more than one.

Thanks to CoachRich for making this suggestion.

Update on the fixes and improvements

I'd like to thank everyone for their extreme patience and understanding the last few weeks.

Tracking down the exact cause of the white pages and double posts has been very time consuming and difficult as the problem was intermittent and elusive. Despite this, I think I've finally found the cause and fixed it! In addition, I've rebuilt our databases, made several other optimizations, and hardware upgrades that will further help improve performance of the site and the community.

All the RAM and hard disks on our servers has been replaced and increased. They now have triple the amount of dual channel RAM and much faster WD GreenPower hard drives that offer a power savings of 4-5 watts.

I've also changed our ad delivery process and it's resulted in the biggest leap in performance of the site. I think you'll agree that pages have been loading much faster.

The forum's built-in search engine has been reenabled but I've also made a few improvements to our Google Custom Search (the search box at the top of every page.) I believe the Google Custom Search is much better at finding exactly what you're looking for, and since it is less resource intensive, I encourage you try using it over the forum's built-in search.

One problem remains
but requires your HELP to fix.
Please go to your Messages and delete all your read private messages. Presently the private message database is over 3.5GB and this is absolutely too big for a site this size. Because of this I've had to dramatically reduce the number of messages everyone is allowed to store. If your message box has exceeded this limit or becomes full you will not be able to receive new ones. (By the way, if you don't wish to receive messages at all you can turn them off in your Preferences.)

Thanks again everyone!

Discuss and comment here

Sometime between now and Sunday December 7th 2008 08:00:00 PM ET the web site will be unavailable for a few hours while our servers are upgraded. You'll get a Server is Unreachable error.

Sorry, that I'm unable to provide a more specific time frame as the datacenter cannot provide one. My experience is this work is usually done between 9AM and 5PM Eastern but there is still an outside chance it'll be done at night.

I wanted for everyone to be aware of this so you don't wait around waiting for the site to come back up. While it's down you may still join our chat room using an IRC client. The server is irc.wyldryde.org and the channel is #bowlingfans