If you were a member of the CAST Team at the beginning of 2010 you know there have been so many changes throughout the year. I just want to recap a few and mention some upcoming changes. You can chime in, in comments with others you remember or tell us what you'd like to see changed in 2011.

As I mentioned in my last post, this CAST blog was started at the beginning of 2010. We'll have over 265 posts by the end of this year. We've welcomed and featured so many great CAST Shops and items. I think the blog has become a nice hub for the CAST Team.

A more recent addition is the new CAST Facebook page. This is a wonderful new tool for our team. If you are on Facebook and haven't done it yet, please go by and "like" the CAST page.

Sheila from sewfaithful has started and maintains a first name list for us. You can find the link in the side column of this blog.

A new improvement has been thanks to Etsy implementing the new Team Format. We now have more tools on site at Etsy to use for our Team.  We have our own little "website" within Etsy and, as a result, have gained a lot of new members very quickly. Under the new Team Format Bonnie (AuntBonniesCloset and TIGGERBONN) is now "Captain" and Sue A from MYSAVIOR and I are additional "Leaders." It's now much quicker and easier for Etsians to apply to CAST Team and for us to review shops.

Our teams now appear on member profile pages. Etsy has plans to make it unnecessary to use our team tags for search as they will be added automatically. In the meantime, continue to use the tag "castteam." We also believe Etsy is working on a way for leaders to be able to convo all the members of a team at once instead of one at a time.

Our Yahoo Group is becoming obsolete. The Yahoo members and the official CAST members don't really have that much overlap anymore as there is no way to synchronize the membership (Yahoo names don't usually match with Etsy names). Also, there is no good way to keep spam out of the Yahoo e-mail. Now that we have so many more tools available to us on site at Etsy the Yahoo Group may be deleted. We shouldn't have to log in to another site in order to connect with each other.

Welcome to all the new members! With the rush of incoming members and the shuffle from one format to another we have suspended New Member Welcomes on the blog for a while, but hope to begin them again soon. There are still a lot of outstanding "invites" to old members to join us on the new format that need to be cleared up in the meantime. If you are a member from the old system and have not yet confirmed your membership under the new system please do that or simply reapply.  Thanks!

Just to let you know, CAST Team is allowing membership to all Etsians who wish to claim that they believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of the Living God, their Savior and their Lord. We love having Christian Artists as well as their supporters on the team. Therefore, if you still have an Etsy membership, but no longer have an active shop, you can still retain your membership.

With the new format we now have the ability to create public or private discussion threads in our own team area on Etsy. If you haven't come by and joined in, please do. We are a friendly group and would love to interact with all team members.

Etsy has made lots of changes this year. Feel free to mention on your favorites in comments. Also, if there is something that you wish to see happen with CAST Team in the coming year, please let us know in comments as well.

Sue of SueRunyonDesigns