First of all, Happy New Year to all bentoists! 2010 is the year of the tiger. (I know, the Chinese or Lunar New Year starts in February, but in Japan the official year goes by the Gregorian calendar, so it's already the Year of the Tiger (Tora in Japanese). Roar!

We have a very simple set of rules to follow here on the forum. Recently, there have been people registering with the sole purpose of spamming the site with stupid links. Such users will be banned immediately, so don't even bother. I hope that we won't have to start screening site registrations, because it is generally a pain in the behind to do so, but if this continues we may have to go that route.

Hi folks. Our current moderators are very busy or on the road right now (including me...yes I am still technically homeless, though that should be changing soon, fingers and toes and eyes crossed), so I think we need one or two more moderators to mind the forum. Your tasks are very easy: just greet new people, click a button if you see a spammy or abusive or problematic post to make it go away, and just be friendly. If you think you'd like to be a moderator and get that cool 'moderator' badget next to your name, just shoot me an email at maki at makikoitoh dot com. Thanks!!

I've added a 'new forum topic' RSS feed. You can subscribe to it by clicking on the feed icon near your username, or via this link.

I'm going to put server/site status notices here. If the server is actually down, then I'll twitter it at @justbento. (Note this is not the same as my chattering twitter account, which is at @bentotips. The traffic to the site is growing at an exponential rate at the moment (just one sign of this is the RSS subscribers have gone from around 1800-2000ish just a few weeks ago to currently above 47,000.) So, there might be some growth problems but I hope that we can keep up.

One more added feature before I go to sleep today. Now that I have turned on moderation of comments for all non-registered users, chances of spam and so on are fairly low, but in case some problem crops up you will notice a X link (if you're logged in) at the end of all forum topics as well as site-wide comments. If you see a problematic comment or forum topic, you can click that and flag it for a moderator (for the moment just me, but probably more in the near future) to look at. Please flag wisely though!