News written by Petteri Pyyny (February, 2007)

AfterDawn.com has reached yet another milestone today. A couple of minutes ago the 2,000,000th message was posted on our discussion forums. The forums were opened in late March 2001 and it took about four and a half years to reach the 1,000,000 post milestone -- the next million was reached in mere 15 months.

AfterDawn.com currently has about 620,000 registered members. Since we launched our site back in 1999 we have served over 75,000,000 software downloads and and almost 6,000,000 legal MP3 downloads through our sister site MP3Lizard.com.

Thanks go out to all our loyal visitors!

Last year, we launched a small competition to our users called innovation contest 2006 in which we wanted to hear innovative ideas from our users on how to improve our site.

During the competition, we received 500 submissions that included thousands of suggestions. Ever since the end of the competition, our staff has been reading through the ideas you guys have sent to us. Some of the ideas were good, some of them were -- unfortunately -- quite bad :-) and some of them just excellent. It was extremely difficult to select the entries that truly provided something "different", but after long consideration, we are certain we picked the right ones.

The grand prize, 1,500 euros in cash, was won by our user called lawndog. The other runner-up prizes, "AfterDawn goodie bags", went to these members: chopper, bulfrog15, Dfram, pahis, bscd, kiiveri and gwendolin.

As some of the ideas were very good and haven't been implemented to our site yet, we can't tell you what the winning suggestions were. But the competition was quite an eye-opener for us in many ways; it proved couple of things that we have suspected for years. First of all, it seems that we have thousands of users who aren't aware of the fact that AfterDawn contains sections like Software or News. It seems that there's a large proportion of users who think that AfterDawn is just a discussion forum site. And equally big chunk of users who have never "found" our discussion forums, but have read our news for years now. Seriously, some of the submissions asked for AfterDawn to "add a place where one could download video-related freeware and software tools".