OK, be honest ...... 
Participation of staff members allowed?
Sure! Everyone!
I would call this site as script encyclopedia
In a hundred words or less, I love this site because:
It's brilliant. I've learnt bucket loads in spades from people on here.
And strangly in the past whenever I "googled" for something and this (or other forums came up) I would avoid them like the plague! Not wanting wishy-washy-waffle, but hard facts! How wrong I was. But this is the best forum sight I have ever seen.
All those wasted years!
A credit to everyone who makes it what it is.
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Accorging to wc, that's 71 words. Not bad!
I enjoy coming here and taking a crack at other people's problems as well as seeing real world problems and their solutions. I think I have learned a whole lot solving or attempting to solve other peoples problems. I have been recommending this site to co-workers since I started coming here.
In tune with scottn, I find that many relevant search results from a search engine are actually from this site.
I just recently found this site, and now I pull it up first thing when I start work in the morning as a Unix Admin and monitor all day.
I hope this place remains FREE a lot of sites after they become popular they succumb to temptation of selling out or start charging fees for access which is totally crap then people leave and they start going downhill.
I suggest you can charge for services built around this forum but keep the core knowledge base forums free. A good idea will be doing something like slicehost.com which NEO mentioned recently, since our community has a large mix of students doing homework and Professionals something like this could be very applicable for testing or trying out new ideas. Another area could be professional training like something related to brain dump or selling simulated exams.
Google For Unix.
Am not being regular these days that I used to be.
But as always unix.com rocks ! 
I like this site very much not only because of the knowledge base, but for the culture of the site which I love and could not find that anywhere.
In a virtual team like this - its unbelievable and the great people here continue to do so. 
Don't worry about that. I agree with you completely. I plan to write a detailed post soon about the value of community in a forum like this versus the value of community in social networking sites where there is little purpose or collaboration. I find the sense of community here much stronger then generic social networking sites.
Could you elaborate on your ideas more?
Thanks.
I just registered to this forum, started learning linux about a year ago, but really took up learning just 2 months ago. Figured i could join some forum, and hey, what's better than here :)?
I really like this place. I signed up today and kind of lost track of time. In the past whenever I had a problem, and I'm like 'hhhhmmm how do I do X in unix?' or 'what unix command can do z', I'd google that and most of the times its this site that would pop up. And the answers are from years back.
I also noticed that there are lots of awk users/answers (???) here.
Yes, I am here *because* of the loads of stuff this site has on shell scripting.
Thanks alot!
I wonder where we are going with the initiative to upgrade this site. There was a tentative plan to restyle, but no prototypes that I have seen lately.
After evaluating vBulletin 4.0, the advisory team decided there was no compelling reason to upgrade to it; and in fact, we found many negative "form over substance" issues.
Hence, for the foreseeable future, we are not going to upgrade to vB 4.0.
Ok, thanks for that update.
To speak frankly about this site...mmm...i can not spend my spare time no where else but this site and i enjoy it...
and i love it.
That's why i am having problem with my girlfriend because i spend more time in this site than with her!!!
For me, the site is a God Send. There is so much rich knowledge to glean even though the responses can be terse to say the least. But I acknowledge that more of a quirk in human nature than anything else.