Douglas (and SMF) needs YOUR help!

I'm not sure if this should be in "Journalism topics only" or in "Anything goes", so move if needed, Webby and Moddy.  Posting with permission from Webby.

First, let me preface this by saying that I will not be writing the actual press release, so don't fret.  Someone more edjumakayted than I will be writing the presser. 

SMF is going to be doing a very major (and final release) of SMF 1.1 in the next 3-8 weeks, and we're looking to get as much publicity as we can for this.  For those of you that don't know what SMF is, you're looking at it right now.  It's forum software.  There's a team of about 30-40 people that work together to develop, provide tech support, translate into 20+ languages, work on the design and market this.  We're ALL volunteers, no one gets paid actual cash (sometimes we do reward people with gifts/merchandise) for their time.  Most of the funds that we raise goes right back into expenses related to developing SMF (Server costs, etc).

What I'm asking for is if anyone would be willing to step up to the plate and run a press release for us in their newspaper, on their TV or Radio program.  We (the SMF team) are really excited about this upcoming release, as it should be the last release of SMF 1.x (barring any bug issues that might pop up), which will let us focus development on SMF 2.0.

We're not looking for press releases on small websites or hobby sites. SMF is a serious forum software package, for serious forum enthusiasts. I own one site that has more than 738,000 posts by less than 800 members in just under four years, and am tech admin on another site where we're expected to clear more than 130,000 posts in the month of September alone. There's another forum out there that has more than 2.2 MILLION posts.

We need CREDIBLE news agencies (Paper/Radio/TV) for our press releases to be done on, not hobby sites with a small fan base.

There's several interest stories that could be spun off of SMF, and could make for a great heart-warming "feel-good" story.  Oh, before I forget, there's several large sports fan sites running SMF, including one for a Soccer team in the UK with more than 2.2 million posts, and most of y'all already know about Hogville.net in one facet or another.

I know that it's not really sports related, so I'm hoping that some of y'all have the power to maybe pull some strings and maybe help this non-profit project out.  We're already going to submit the press release to Slashdot (/.), as well as Digg.com.  I would really like to see this press release get out there as much as possible!

I have turned on my private messages, my email is in my profile, so if you think you're game for helping SimpleMachines (www.simplemachines.org), please do get ahold of me via this post, private messages, email or on the SMF site (I post as Douglas there, as well).  We would all really appreciate your help!

Thank you in advance for at least considering this and for your time.

Douglas

 

DyePack, throw up your proposal, and I'll present it to the team.

 

I've updated the first post with exactly what we're looking for.

 

I wish I could help, but I don't have access to such an outlet any longer.

I will say this, after using vBulletin exclusively in the past as a forum engine for my site development, I expect to use SMF for my next two non-sports sites which will go live later this year. I'm very impressed with the development curve of this software.

Kudos to the entire SMF development team.