Newsletter #10 - December, 2015.
Whazzup ProCollabers!
“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” - Edith Sitwell.
We just want to take this time to wish everyone a very happy and healthy holiday. Thank you all so much for making our first 10 months so great. Yep, there is still a way to go, but we have faith that the site and our community will flourish into the New Year and continue to grow and to produce the best collaborative music on the internet. And what better way to spend the cold winter nights (or warm summer ones for some) than in your home studio creating some amazing music. So go on, get to makin’ some music already!
Christmas Challenge
Ye deadline for submissions is nigh, so thy collaborators, ye might want to start garnishing the finishing touches to your modern renditions!
They sound incredible as they are, but we sure can’t wait to hear the finished products. You guys are amazing, and we sure do appreciate your Christmas spirit!
Submission deadline is midnight (EST). Wednesday the 23rd of December.
Three Cool New Features
Thanks to the feedback received from the recent survey, we've been able to focus some attention on features that members are asking for. If you didn't notice them already, below is a summary of three cool new features.
- Follow a Project
You're now able to follow your favorite projects on ProCollabs. On every project page, you'll see the 'Follow Project' button.
Currently, this feature allows you to track projects that are of interest to you and keeps them conveniently listed on your Dashboard. A future improvement may be to send notifications to you when something in the project changes, or when there are new comments. Let us know what you think, and how you'd like to see this feature developed further.
- Trending Projects
A new 'Trending Projects' section has been added to the community page. This feature highlights current 'works in progress' that are favored by our members.
Only open projects that are less that one month old are included and ranking is based on the total number of 'likes' given by members.
As activity on the site increases, we will look to further tune the rankings more precisely, which might include consideration of other statistics, like the number of plays and downloads. If anyone has ideas about this, feel free to put your suggestions forward.
- Talent Needed
A new Talent Needed section has also been added to the community page. Here, you can quickly see the newest projects that are actively seeking specific talents.
Note also that when the Talent Needed section is changed in a project, the new talent list is now included in the community stream. In addition, talents needed are matched to all member profiles and an email is sent to those with matching talents.
Email traffic for this particular feature should be low for the time being - especially if you play the triangle 
- but should you not want to receive these notifications, there are two options that enable you to disable this feature. You can:
- Click the ‘microphone’ icon on your profile page to make yourself ‘unavailable for collaborations’; or
- Disable the specific email notification from the email notification settings page in your user profile area.
* Project Directors – please be proactive in maintaining your 'talents needed'. For example, once you accept a guitar track into your project, make sure you edit your 'talents needed' section by un-clicking ‘guitar’, etc.
Payment Plans
We're steamrolling ahead, but still stuff to do and celebrations to be had. So we've decided to hold off on implementing the payment plans until after the New Year. Happy Christmas to all! 
Member Survey
To date, we've received a number of replies to our online survey and we greatly appreciate the time you've taken to fill it in. Overall, feedback has been positive. The new features mentioned above and some other enhancements have been brought forward in development thanks to your feedback too.
There have also been some statements that lead us to believe that there can be some confusion as to how certain things work, or the purpose of certain features on the site. In the coming weeks, we hope to highlight some of the common questions or confusion and explain what's what, in a little but more detail. A good place to start, meantime, is the tutorial section, where a lot of your questions have already been answered.
For those of you who did not take the survey yet, please take 5 minutes to fill it out – it helps us to know what you like, dislike, and would like to see on ProCollabs. Take the survey now.
Tutorials and Help
For the new members who've recently joined – please feel free to browse through the tutorial section.
Please do take the time to understand the collaboration process and particularly the subject of copyright in a joint work, and how we have implemented it on ProCollabs. This is a key responsibility of all collaborators.
We also encourage you to contact our moderators for questions, assistance or clarification at any stage of your project. We're here to help you get the most out of the site!
Spread The Word!
Word of mouth counts. Spread the word about ProCollabs, if you enjoy collaborating with others, then invite your musician friends to join. Get them in before the beta period ends and they'll be thanking you for some big savings too ;)
And please do stop by our social media pages and show us some lurve. We're happy that our numbers are growing, but they can triple if you guys can help pimp us too. Below are the links to our Social Media pages.
https://twitter.com/procollabs
https://www.facebook.com/procollabs
https://plus.google.com/+ProcollabsMusic
New Members
Warm welcome to the new members who recently joined: Frederic, mgamel, HollieOlson, bojackey, Tito, Xenios, hififrey, Sterling, Vladimir, pjackson1961, The6thDimension, jonszenics, X42R, Pash237, Jurgen, Mrghoust, Mudflappus, ecastellano.
We encourage all newbies to introduce themselves in the forum introduction thread and get collaborating asap. There's no shortage of talented and creative individuals in ProCollabs Projectland, so jump on it! Talents in need include guitars, vocals, keyboards, drums, strings, brass and others – all in various genres!
We'll be sending out more updates soon. In the meantime, get yourself on over to procollabs.com and let's make some new and exciting music together!
~ The ProCollabs Team
