Fair comment.

However both the posts referred to were made as replies within forum threads. Forum users are only a small, though vociferous, minority of the WCG community which is why my original post refered to timely and informative updates, disseminated in the broadest possible way to the community

Whilst I can, and do, use the search function to keep abreast of tech and admin posts I suspect many forum users do not.

If a WCG blog is not forthcoming then ideally all posts by WCG techs and admins should be available to view in one place as well as the thread to which they relate. Alternatively maybe the Watch function in the forum could be modified to watch posts by named members.

Thanks all for constant and useful feedback.

Regarding the comments about us providing updates in the forums only, instead of using other methods which are more accessible to the wider community.. It's true, that our most frequent posts and conversations happen in the forums or on social media. Historically, we've been reluctant to use more traditional methods (such as sending member emails or posting News & Updates articles) for interim updates and only use those when we have significant news to share. This is partly because we don't want to bombard people with information, while recognizing that more interested members would come to the forums for answers if they don't feel like they're getting the information they need.

We are implementing functionality to allow members to have more control over what type of news they want to receive, and how they want to receive it. Such functionality will allow us to be more relaxed about posting news, since it'll give you the option of not hearing about it if you don't want to. We don't yet have a release date for this functionality but it's reasonably far along in development. I won't pretend that we'll get this right the first time, this is purely acknowledgement that we understand these concerns and we're taking first steps to try and address them.

As for having so few active projects, I'd like to remind our members that while we did have 12 active projects at one point, that was an exception and it's rare for us to have more than 4-5 active projects. While it was nice for our volunteers to have so much choice, supporting so many projects at the same time didn't allow us to spend as much time onboarding new ones, for example. And speaking of onboarding new projects, we have yet to iron out all testing issues we've come across for our next (cancer) project. We're working aggressively with the researchers to get those last issues out of the way so that we can go into beta testing soon (we hope!).