COMMUNITY OPERATIONS NEWS
Carole worked on the 4th of July events which were a great success. Musicians wearing band avatars "performed" via streaming RealAudio and there were fireworks displays and barbeques serving hamburgers and an ice cream vendor and we got good online press for this. The event was hosted jointly with Virtual Paris and the celebrations extended right up to Bastille Day, July 14th. You can see a full report with pictures here . Carole also worked on the Cybertown Birthday Party on 6/15/99. There was a stage with a podium and an animated cake and a marching band and fireworks for the party. About 180 people crowded the City Plaza for this event.
Cybertown is also playing a big part in both the Worldcon International Sci-fi event and at Avatar99 and a lot of planning and preparation work is being done on this. Carole and Kue also gave Cybertown demos at The Next Twenty Years event. Per Carole, "Our table was mobbed! We had an almost constant crowd 3 people deep around our table."
Carole and Kris also did extensive HTML work on the new "How Do I?" pages and on the new Tourist Info Center which answers the top 13 questions received in e-mail help requests. Carole also wrote most of the Mina infobot's questions and answers.
A Celebrity Chat event was started but then stopped due to discovering the guest's unsuitability for Cybertown's family environment. Some of the things being worked on now include d etermining more email and postcard-sending locations, d etermining locations to collect profiling information, composing instant fun polling questions, determining where resident's account balances should be visible, r efining the Experience Points System, balancing the Economy System, improving Block Stats info and Celeb Chat events.