As we begin a new year, and the Silver Bloggers Community starts it's second year, we thought it opportune not just to wish everyone well, but to reflect on the past nine months and look forward to the new year.

First, an apology: both Silver-Blonde Lizzie and I (Silver Flower) have been AFK a lot this festive season. We both have RL commitments at this time of the year, and @lizelle had a few additional challenges which she may well tell you about in time. So we've not been able to give the community the attention it deserves. We'll get to what we're doing about that in a bit.

We continue to grow

• We are delighted that our numbers continue to grow: we now have 700 subscribers.

• The account has nearly 6,000HP in delegations from just 19 Silver Bloggers which goes a long way to our being able to upvote and reblog members' posts.

• There were 14 rounds of the Blog Of the Week. Winners benefitted from @lizelle's regular sponsorship of 20 Hive for each edition. For other prizes, a total 194 Hive was sponsored by Silver Bloggers: @cicisaja, @dandays, @cicisaja, @justclickindiva, @owasco, @mondoshawan and from @plantstoplanks a whopping 100 Hive.

To all of you:

Growing pains and sharing the load

Firstly, a big thank you to our Silver Fish who has stepped up to the plate both as a moderator in our Discord Server and with the funky circular Silver Bloggers logo in the banner and below:

You will find these and others in a dedicated channel in our Discord.

Because of the way the community is growing and because of some of the RL challenges some of the team are facing, and have had to take a step back. This means that we're still looking for folk who would like to help share the load.

If you'd like to lend a hand, please pop in to our new Discord Channel? Tag either Silver-Blonde Lizzie or Silver Flower. Bear with us - because of RL and time zone issues - we may not get back to you immediately, but we will!

You asked, we listened

As folk have joined our Discord - there are now nearly 60 - you have asked for the equivalent of a post promotion channel. This is exclusively for subscribed Silver Blogger and for posts in the in the Silver Bloggers Community, and fit with the community's preferred topics and interests.

A reminder of the preferred community topics and "concerns"

You will find the community description here, but here's a reminder, anyway:

A community for retired and aspirant retiree bloggers, seasoned and wannabe crypto hodlers.

The Silver Bloggers’ community brings together young-at-heart kindred spirits and younger 'old souls'. The golden threads, in addition to a love of blogging and photography, are –

• a keenness to learn more about blockchain and crypto – we’re not digital natives – most of us were born before the PC was imagined; we ask “stoopid” questions

• a compulsion to share our life experiences for storage on the blockchain for our children and children’s children

• musings and memories of lives lived – the happy and the sad, the long and the short

• planning for life beyond formal work – from leisure and travel to second (or third…) careers, hobbies that can supplement pensions and just what keeps “un” working people busy

For those new to the community:

Who are Silver Bloggers?

When the community was launched, the thought was that the community be restricted to folks over forty, and whose hair is beginning to turn silver. In other words, and yes, I'm going to say it: the older Hivean. The so-called silver surfer, mums, dads, grannies and grandpas, aunts, uncles, and more to the point, the greats (aunts, uncles, and yes, grannies and grandpas).

Soon, though, we discovered that there were younger folk who wanted to join the community - and it was hard to actually confirm that they were, in fact, whippersnappers!

So

It has to come down to the post fit.

Back to the housekeeping

1. Blog of the week - we are re-imagining this popular initiative and will be re-launching it towards the end of January. So, for those who are concerned that they contributed to the prize pool: what's left in the kitty (63 Hive) will be carried forward.

2. Growing the community account (@hive-106316): in her post announcing the establishment of this community account, @lizelle said that all rewards would go to the account. It is slowly growing. Some of the liquid Hive and HBD will continue to go into the prize pool. The rest is put into savings and powered up - usually on #HivePUD day. We didn't this month because of aforesaid RL challenges, but we have both diarised to sort things for the second Power Up Day of 2022.

Why grow the community account?

The long term goal of growing the community account is to give back to its members by -

• supporting regular contributors to the community through curation (votes on posts and comments)
• building a nest-egg of prizes for deserving contributions to the community challenges and contests.

Delegations enable the team to do more with less while the account is growing.

All rewards other than those that go to the team who spend time on writing posts (set to 20% of the posts they author), are powered up to build the account.

And
If you can't or would rather not delegate, we encourage you, when you post in the community, to set the account as a 5% beneficiary. Thank you in advance!

Come and join our Silver Bloggers community

Join us on Discord in the Silver Bloggers server

And, thank you in advance

Delegation	Delegation	Delegation
10	20	40
50	100	150
200	500	1,000