Good morning and welcome to our first Bell Tree Direct of the year, which leads us directly to the primary topic of today's announcements. Not only is this the first Bell Tree Direct of 2024, but this Direct is about The Bell Tree in 2024. This is a year of special significance to the site!
Twenty Years of TBT
As you may know, The Bell Tree started in the ancient days of the internet. Back in 2004, before the existence of YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, or social media as a concept, you could join a small forum to talk about the market price of turnips in your virtual town. The Bell Tree has changed in many ways in the two decades since then, but hopefully, it has continued to act as an online home for all of you, the thousands of diverse people who make up this community. While TBT's actual 20th birthday is on November 7th, we're dedicating the full year of 2024 to this milestone!We have an extra large lineup of events happening throughout the year, some new, some more familiar but with a twist. We're also starting two new projects to help showcase the community and its history. I'll talk more about these in the sections below.
An Extra Special Year of Events
A special year deserves special events, so we have something planned at least every month! For the first time, we've created a (tentative) schedule for the entire year. The table below shows our list of planned events, both big and small, but keep in mind that there may be changes as these dates get closer. There's also the possibility for other small happenings to be added to the schedule because these only represent the ones that have been planned so far. Our goal is to make each event unique enough and fit together in a way that they won't be overwhelming.
| Tentative start date | Tentative end date | Event | Special notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 9th | February 24th | Lunar New Year | New event |
| March 7th | March 18th | Farewell to New Leaf Online | One-time event |
| March 29th | April 1st | TBT's Twelfth Annual Easter Egg Hunt | Special 20th Year Edition |
| April 1st | April 2nd | Hmmm... | What could it be? |
| April 20th | April 28th | Hybrid Flower Breeding | Returning after 5 years |
| May 18th | June 2nd | TBT World Championships 2024 | Returning after 3 years |
| June 7th | June 16th | Celebrating Diversity 2024 | |
| July 27th | August 25th | The Bell Tree Fair 2024 | Birthday Party Edition |
| September 20th | September 29th | Mushroom Season | New event |
| October 18th | October 31st | Halloween | Details TBD |
| November 7th | November 10th | Twenty Years on The Bell Tree | |
| December 12th | December 25th | TBT's Season of Giving 2024 |
The Bell Tree Fair, happening this summer, will act as TBT's official birthday party celebration. This will be followed by a small 20-year event in November to remember the forum's history. Aside from these, there are plenty of other new and returning events happening during the other months. We're starting this Friday with a first for the forum: Lunar New Year!
Join us this weekend for the start of the Year of The Dragon and its new TBT event!
Introducing the Art Book Project
This year, we're starting a new project to help do exactly that: a digital art book for The Bell Tree. This will be a free book, published in digital form, displaying hundreds of different pieces of artwork created by your fellow TBTers. We would also like to keep the option open to publish a physical form of the book in the future, so it will be created in a way that can allow for this to happen.
This project is in the very early stages of planning and we'll likely be reaching out to you, the community, for help in the upcoming months. Each artist will need to give permission for their artwork to appear in the book. In some cases, we may also need a higher-quality image if one exists. We'll also be tasked with sorting through thousands of pieces of art to select the ones that will be featured. This will not be limited to event winners and we hope to include a large number of entries, but there will need to be some sort of selection process to determine which ones should be included. We hope you're excited to see the community's amazing art all together in one place. Feel free to let us know your thoughts and suggestions!
Introducing the Forum Archive Project
This project will create one central public archive of our events and other retired boards. The boards will be closed to posting, organized together in some way, and placed under a subforum of Bell Tree HQ. Not every event or discussion board in TBT's history was meant to be permanently public, so this will require the staff to slowly go through decades of boards that are privately archived. These will then be combined with the currently public, yet unlisted, boards that we've used when closing out events in recent years.
We hope to share the contents of this project later in the year and we'll be open to hearing your input when that time comes.
New Reactions!
After much staff consideration and community input, we've added two new default reactions.
The hug reaction is a useful way to show your care, support, and camaraderie for other users and their posts.
The celebrate reaction is the perfect way to show congratulations, celebration, or excitement.Let us know what you think about the decision we came to after your input from the September Direct. Hopefully, the friendly blue blobs are clear enough to accurately portray their intended meaning!
Upcoming Downtime
Now for something a little less exciting. Starting the morning (ET) of March 4th, the site will go offline for server maintenance. While we don't have an exact estimate for when it will come back online, the maintenance should be expected to take a good portion of the day. In the meantime, we invite everyone to visit our Discord server. This is backend maintenance, so there will be no visible differences on the forum once we're back online.
Free Bells!
Like many of our other Directs, this one comes with free bells! Be sure to redeem them before they expire next week!
Click here to receive your 65 Bells!
And that concludes today's announcements. We hope to see you two days from now for the start of our brand-new Lunar New Year event! Thanks for reading!
i imagine engagement numbers will be higher as we know what’s coming 
