Dear members ...

iKolam has been a fullfledged member-driven website "By members - For members". We are proud to announce that we now showcase more than 4000 rangolis in our site! We have seen some real rapid growth the last couple of years. We are experiencing some growing pains in the process. We incur two types of charges from our service provider: Storage and network bandwidth. Both are not free. We have been reaching the limits of both storage as well as network bandwidth. iKolam is a media-rich site, since most of the content is image based; we are very close to using up all the allotted space for our server.

iKolam members broadly fall into two categories: active members, who actively participate in various aspects of the site; passive members, who remain really quite. We want to channel our energy and resources more toward the active members. We would continue to provide uninterrupted service to all active members. Passive members may not be given full access to the site.

Being a member driven site, we want to encourage more participation from all of our members. We will be implementing a point system that is meant to track the level of participation. Every kind of activity, e-g uploading a rangoli, posting a cafe topic, commenting, voting etc will each carry some points. The level of access granted in the site will be commensurate with the points earned. We will post more details about this feature in the coming weeks.

iKolam is a free site and is supported in part by the advertisements. Since last year, we have been able to offset part of our hosting expenses through the ad-revenue. We hope to continue this for the foreseeable future. We believe the point system would enable us to better serve the active members, while encouraging everybody to participate more.

We will be updating the member profile pages to reflect the more statistics like no of uploaded rangolis,topics, comments, points earned, storage space allotted etc. Watch out for this in the next couple of weeks.

Given this backdrop, VOTING during contest days and giving feedback for the submissions is an important task! Start collecting your points The diwali rangoli contest voting pages are now open. Click here to vote.