I’ve been monitoring the transcripts of the recent chats, and although I’ve been unable to attend any of them because of “LIFE” (if you know me, you know why) it has become clear that there really is no logical reason to continue paying for the chat room this time.

With the new season not currently schedule to start until January 2012, the earliest we probably would resume regular group chats would be some time at the end of December. Currently, it is not unusual for only 2-3 people to show up for the weekly chats, and even then the actual Southland discussions last about 5 minutes max, then the rest of the time is spent on personal discussions that could easily be done on personal Instant messaging or Facebook chat.

At our current rates, we are paying $15/month (thanks to paraChat giving us a DEEP discount) which would be $60-$75 between now and the end of the year. The problem is, I have received IN TOTAL only $117.00 ($111.42 after fees) in donations this year. So far this year, I have already paid $212.79 on the chat room and $578.23 total on the website, between the chat room, shipping for the charity auction and domain names. So, for 2011 alone, I am currently $466.81 in the hole, and that doesn’t count values brought forward from 2010.

Now, I love Southland, but we are NOT a 501(c)(3) non-profit or any other type of charity. I have to pay for this stuff out of pocket. If none of the users/fans consider it important enough to even contribute a measly $5 once in a while to help keep the site running, then I am not going to pay out of my pocket and take money from my family & my business to let people gossip and play around. It’s that simple.

Bottom line – if people want the site and the features it offers, then they need to put their money where their mouths are. Without the donations, and with everyone flocking here to Facebook instead of the website, I don’t see a need to continue the effort or the expenses.

It’s been a while since anything was posted here, so I thought I should post something to keep everyone updated!

Charity Auction

We conducted our second round of the Charity Auction and the results were, well, less than overwhelming. While two people did take advantage of the “Buy It Now” feature that we added this time around to outright purchase a a couple of the autographed photos, the general response and interest in event was lackluster at best.

The good news is, we raised a total of over $700 for AmeriCares. $700 for AmeriCares equals to over $30,000 in aid delivered on the ground in Northern Japan, so I’m thrilled about that. Major thanks should be given to those who participated in the auction and supported this wonderful cause. Overall, however, I am seriously disappointed in the lack of support from our community. Not just the lack of bids – I understand financial hardship – but also in the lack of helping to promote the auction, failure to help by Retweeting the item posting tweets, or anything else to help promote it to the public in general. How much would that have cost fora a show we all supposedly loe so much, from people who spend so much time talking about it online, who also spent so much time tweeting & Facebooking about the tragedy in Japan? (continue reading…)

Southland Fans, I have an important question for you that I really need your feedback on!

Among other things, in the 2+ years that I have been running this site I have accumulated multiple domain names in order to protect our interests and prevent “domain squatters” from ruining our online reputation as the #1 Southland Fan Community.

What does that mean in real life terms? Well, for example, not only do we own SouthlandTvFans.com, but we also own the .net, .org, .info, .me, .mobi, .tv, .biz, .us and even .co.uk versions of SouthlandTvFans. We also own multiple variations of SouthlandForums and RenewSouthland (which we used for the petition), sfc.me (used for our own custom Short Links) and we even own Southland.me!

So here is the question of the hour! (continue reading…)

I believe I speak for all us fans when I say that we are thrilled by the news that Southland has been renewed by a 4th season! We may have to wait until next January to see new episodes (as the latest unconfirmed rumors indicate), but hey, at least we are getting more of our favorite show!! We have something to look forward to for the remainder of the year and much to discuss with speculations, story ideas and so on.

On a side note, thank you to everyone who signed our “Renew Southland” Petition – while ultimately it may have proven unnecessary (or maybe not? who knows!) I know that the show of support was appreciated on many levels, by many people – you’ll have to trust me on this one and leave it at that . We got over 2000 signatures on the petition (slightly less than that confirmed), with only word-of-mouth advertising for it, and for that we are very appreciative. Thankfully (and with thanks to TNT and Warner Brothers) it was not necessary for us to really push the petition into overdrive.

Sadly, the news of the renewal was marred by the tragic events in Japan earlier this month. For those of us on this site and the online Southland Fan community, this is brought all that much closer to home because of the immense and important participation in our community by our very own Hinako, aka @pinelou, who along with her family is a resident of Tokyo. Of course, our hearts go out to all of those affected by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, but as with any disaster of this sale, knowing someone personally who has been affected by a disaster really brings it home for you, no matter how large or small.

After speaking with our website Steering Committee as well as several of the cast members of Southland, I have decided to hold a Charity Auction to help raise some funds for Japan. We may not raise millions, or even thousands, of dollars for them, but in a situation like this every penny counts. So let’s show the world what the Southland Fan community can do! (continue reading…)

As you have probably already noticed if you reading this, our website has received a bit of a long-overdue facelift!

The changes are small, but cumulative. The HUGE background graphic has been replaced with a much, much smaller 1 pixel high graphic that repeats, which should drastically increase the page load time now.

I have also seriously tweaked the styles used on the pages, to set the background colors around the Category menus using CSS styles, rather than relying on the background graphic to do so. This has two benefits – speed (as mentioned above) and much greater compatibility with multiple browser types, as not all browsers displayed things the same way (most notably Internet Explorer) which made things look really, really funky on the site when viewed with them. You might also notice some little things, like rounded corners on the post/sidebar boxes.

The rest of the changes are fairly subtle and primarily deal with speed and style enhancements – I won’t bore you with the details. Needless to say, an overhaul was long overdue (e.g., we still said that filming had started after the season was over! D’Oh!) and I hope to keep things much more up to date in the future.

Thank you to all who have helped keep this site alive and have shown their love for the show that is SouthLAnd. It is your love for the show that keeps us doing this, keeps ME doing this. Without you, we would be nothing!