The RfB is 6!

April 13, 2000 - the Resources for Bears celebrates its sixth anniversary today, ending a year of substantial changes to the site, and beginning its seventh year of ``serving the online ursine'' by launching expanded services to Spanish-speaking bears worldwide. Some of the highlights of the last year include:

• We've changed our look! New graphics, new user interfaces, and a greater use of dynamic pages and database access.

• In July, the site moved to a new faster server and location with far greater bandwidth. Until then, all of the connections were made over a dedicated 28.8k phone line, which still managed to handle the one million transactions per month received. Since then, the number of transactions has doubled.

• Bear News was launched in the Summer of 1999, as a point of presence for news, information, and goings-on within the bear community. It has been boosted by partnerships with other online services such as BearPress which now supplies ``headlines'' as a regular feature.

• Bear Tracks also went online last summer, and is a quick way to jot down comments, retorts, and pick-up lines.

• The RfB established a partnership with Amazon.com for bear-related books and movies. Funds obtained from the partnership are used to defray RfB maintenance costs.

• The 2000 by 2000 campaign for our online bear listings, NetBears, was a complete success, reaching its goal in mid-November! We have over 1000 active bears of all types from all over the planet listed.

To kick off our seventh year, we happy to unveil our newest contribution, and to announce a new era for the RfB. So that we can provide better outreach to the global bear community, we have made our first steps to ``globalizing'' the RfB by creating a Spanish translation of the site beginning with the most-visited sections. As the translation is completed, we will also be making the improvements necessary to add other languages, and we hope that this will promote communication among bears of different cultures.

What's coming up? Improvements are underway, especially to NetBears (we promise not to call it ``Netbears 2000''), and new services are under development. As always, we appreciate your support, your comments, and your enthusiasm, and we love to hear from you.

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