Wow, what a year 2017 has turned out to be! What lies ahead for 2018?
Where shall we begin?
Let’s start with you!!
The forum is now over 7,000 members strong and you’ve made over 60,000 posts! But that’s not the half of it (and we’ve been bursting to share this with you for a while now…) remember back in February on our first birthday we shared that we had served an incredible 1.1 million pages in our first year alone? Well, our latest figures show that we’re now serving over half a million pages - a month!! If you’re wondering whether that’s just because of a core group of regular members who religiously log in and read everything that’s posted… it’s not! Over 300,000 of those pages are served to guests/non-logged in visitors! Ah, you might say, bots!! Nope!! Bots and logged in users account for the remaining 200,000 
It doesn’t stop there either, we’ve now also sent over a whopping one million emails!! 
These are pretty incredible figures, don’t ya think? Well YOU are the ones behind it. It’s not just about quantity of posts, it’s about the quality of them, and the care, thought, and pride you all put into them - you post stuff that people actually want to read or find helpful. That’s what attracts people to the forum and keeps them coming back, so well done each and every one of you!! 
It’s clear many of you love the forum - and the forum loves you!! This is why we go to great lengths to organise awesome giveaways, discounts and hold our Members of the Month scheme…
2018 Giveaways!!
Last year we gave away 6 prizes a month, and we’re not going to disappoint you this year! We have have the same number of prizes but where the total value has more than doubled!
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Win ANY Elixir ebook from PragProg - TWO winners every month!!
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Win ANY Elixir ebook from Manning - TWO winners every month!!
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Win a years worth of AppSignal! - Worth $529!
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Win a years worth of Semaphore! - Worth $996!
Cool huh?
Members of the Month
Last year we had 48 Members of the Month, this year we’re going to have 50!!
We’ll be doing something a little different this year too. Instead of holding these every month, we’ll do them every quarter. You might remember that last year we had some catching up to do - so we were looking at activity over 12 to 18 months. This year, by doing them quarterly, we can look at the last quarter’s (or maybe up to last 6 month’s) activity.
As it’s a new year, everything’s been reset - so members who won last year are eligible again this year; we’re sure you’d agree that those who add something of value or help members or the forum should always be recognised and rewarded whenever possible 
###Let’s not forget our Discounts!!
We’ve got some super discounts lined up for you this year!!
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35% off any ebook published by PragProg!
PragProg were so impressed with the forum last year, that this year the discount is officially going to be 35% off! We say officially because unbeknown to us they had actually set it to 35% at some point in the year, and on review of the results, that’s what they want it to be this year!! You can use the discount multiple times and for ANY ebook published by them - it doesn’t even have to be an Elixir book! Yep, that’s how much PragProg love us <3. Coupon code ‘ElixirForum’. -
35% off any ebook published by Manning!
Yes, Manning love us too! And again, the code can be used multiple times and for any of their ebooks. I think we’re very lucky that two of the best tech publishers out there are rooting for Elixir. Publishers are often predictors in areas like these, and I think it’s very heartening to see they are backing Elixir <3. Coupon code ‘elixirforum18’. -
10% off AppSignal!
AppSignal is the first fully featured platform providing error tracking and performance insights for Elixir and Phoenix applications. Get 10% off with your forum discount! Coupon code ‘elixirforum’. -
10% off Semaphore!
Semaphore lets you test and deploy code at the push of a button with hosted continuous integration and delivery. It’s actually partly built with Elixir - no wonder it’s twice as fast as other similar services, right? Get 10% off with your forum discount! Coupon code ‘elixirforum’. -
20% off ANY Pragmatic Studio course!
Want to learn Elixir? Why not try the Pragmatic Studio’s online course?, or their latest Elixir, Elm and Phoenix course - or in fact any of their courses! Get 20% off with coupon code “elixirforum”. -
10% off tickets to the Code BEAM SF conference
Code Sync is the new brand name for the Erlang Factories conferences. To celebrate the launch of their new brand they are giving forum members 10% off their Code BEAM conference which will be held in San Francisco on 15-16 March 2018. Get your discount by contacting gurpreet.parmar@erlang-solutions.com and mentioning the Elixir Forum!
Our Sponsors
All these giveaways, prizes, discounts and more are all made possible because of our awesome sponsors. So this year we’ll give our Sponsors a little something extra; the chance to feature in a new Sponsor Spotlight block in our digest emails. They’ve clearly taken an interest in us, so let’s get to know them a little better too
Please visit our sponsor’s page to check them out: http://sponsors.elixirforum.com (please refresh your browser to pick up this year’s Sponsors).
Anything else and what’s in store for 2018?
Absolutely!
- Chris McCord deprecated the Phoenix Talk mailing list in favour of the forum in July
- We’ll be moving to a more powerful server to accommodate the continued growth
- We’ll be moving to a tags based system which will, amongst other things, make it easier for library authors to keep track of threads for their respective libraries
- We’ll be launching a sister site to the forum
Re the last point, some of you may remember that this was pencilled in for last year. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it!) the forum had taken up more time than I anticipated - but this is a good problem to have! This is also part of the reason we are moving to a tags based system; so that we can simplify the sections to make things more intuitive (currently we spend quite a bit of time re-categorising and titling threads). However we’ll post more about these items later.
The Phoenix team also deprecated the Phoenix Talk mailing list in favour of the forum in July last year, with Chris McCord saying:
The forum has become the best place for questions and discussions around Phoenix so we’ve decided to consolidate to a single location. The phoenix-core mailing list will remain for core related discussions and announcements. See you on http://elixirforum.com . Thanks!
One final point, some of you may be wondering where all the newbies have gone as we don’t seem to get as many (and often, repeated) newbie related questions these days. That’s because all of your hard work has paid off! Anyone googling newbie type questions now will almost certainly find an answer because our threads will show up! This is part of the reason we serve so many pages - because your posts are helping thousands upon thousands of users …and in seconds or minutes not hours or days. It’s why Elixir users like Devon are saying things like this:
What a great note to wrap this update on - thank you @devonestes!
Well what a year it’s been and what a year 2018 is shaping up to be - with top tech publishers, leading companies and dev shops and YOU, all rooting for Elixir, things can only go from strength to strength.
Thank you everyone - here’s to an even bigger and better year - for all of us!
and thank YOU for all you do and for being a part of it too 
it, but … there is a just one problem! I heard that:
…if you have posted more than a few times then believe me when I say that you’re very much a part of the forum - even when you might not think you are. The reason I’m saying this is because over the years (on other forums I admin) on occasion some members have said that they sometimes feel like an outsider, which has made me feel terribly sad because all along they’ve been the complete opposite - well-liked and just as much a part of the family as anyone else.
), Registry, debugging in IEx and others, there was Phoenix 1.3 release, which changes a lot and Ecto 2.x, so next great things ahead! 
