October 16 is a very special day for us. It marks the official one year anniversary of our new site! During this past year 564 people filled out applications for membership, with most of them deciding to ‘take the plunge’ and actually joining us in our fight against AVN. Thank you to all who have joined us because together, we can make a difference. For more information on our progress, please make sure you read our ‘Stats’, located toward the end of this edition of Group News.

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Interaction: the core of our organization –

Our message boards are the real heart of our interaction. With 8 different specific area-topic boards, members can keep up with the latest news in orthopedics, share their stories and experiences, offer some heart-felt support to those who need some understanding, share hobbies and lots of humor, and just simply keep in touch with one another. As of this writing, there are 3, 356 messages on our boards. That is a whole lot of communicating! With Google’s dynamic translator, members can now read everything on our site no matter what language they speak! (See: http://translate.google.com)

More dynamic interaction: Our real-time chat room -

Our chat room has been really busy recently! We now offer regularly weekly scheduled chats on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Come meet our newest chat co-host, Patrisha, who hosts two chats per week. Les and Marie host the other two chats, and Lynette will be returning when she is feeling better. You need to be a registered member to attend our chats; chat schedule can be found in our Article and Links library.

Information Libraries –

We probably have the largest online info libraries in the world for people who suffer from AVN. With more than 3 gigabytes of data, our libraries are constantly growing! We began gathering data as far back as 1999, when we were a part of the Yahoo Groups Community, and we’ve never stopped. With our libraries’ excellent search features, you can easily and quickly find any topic. Also, our huge Helpful Links library has had more than 280 new links added to it over this past year, connecting members to the latest news on the ‘Net for AVN and more. A virtual ton of information is neatly sorted and cataloged -- and literally at your fingertips, with a touch of your mouse!

Press Release –

We will be publishing a Press Release on the Internet in time for our first anniversary. Please come back to this page for the URL to our new release!

Stats -

As of Sept. 2, and so far for 2010, our site has had 406,773 page views! This does not include those automatic robot web crawlers. Only real, live visitors and members who are actually accessing and/or reading our many pages are counted. Since we officially opened our doors last October, a grand total over-all of 493,419 page views have been counted. That is roughly one half million page views, which I think is very good for our first 11 months, and considering that ours is still considered a rare disease! We are capturing the world’s attention, making people everywhere aware of AVN.

Speaking of ‘everywhere’, our top 22 countries (where our visitors and members come from) are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, China, Russian Federation, Germany, Brazil, Romania, Argentina, India, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, India, Spain, Greece, Barbados, Ukraine, Vietnam and Ireland. Thank you to all who have stopped by and who have joined our organization.

To translate our site into another language, please go to http://translate.google.com

What Lies Ahead –

We are constantly trying to meet our members’ needs, whether it’s providing and/or updating information or lending some emotional support. We have a new “Members Stories” section planned for our Articles library, which will focus in part on coping with without benefit of surgery, or while awaiting surgery. We also hope to add a few more live chats, and to expand our photo albums. It all takes time – and we are continuing to grow with each passing day.

It all starts with joining us. If you have AVN, then you have come to the right place!