Working in open source software or helping others on platforms like forums and chat rooms can often be a thankless task. Sometimes, going out of your way to recognise someone’s efforts or to thank them can not only be greatly appreciated, but genuinely inspiring. So to help foster a spirit of appreciation we’ll be running a Members of the Month scheme 
Every month we’ll select a member who has gone above and beyond in helping either the forum itself, such as by moderating or helping with general house-keeping of threads (which anyone at Trust Level 3 can do) or by helping our members more directly either via their threads, by writing Wiki’s, guides or just generally being welcoming or adding some sort of value to the forum.
We’ll be giving them a little gift too - an eBook from PragProg or Manning 
To begin with selections won’t be based on just the previous months activity (as we have some months catching up to do!) but over time we’ll try to move towards relatively recent activity - and although this is a members of the month scheme, we’ll do them every 3 or 4 months to make things a little easier.
We hope you’ll enjoy our MOTM scheme and we hope none of you will be offended if you are missed… with so many wonderful members here it would be impossible to select all of you. If you come across someone who you feel has gone above and beyond in helping you, please take some time out to thank them, even if that is to ‘like’ their post as number of likes and things like accepted solutions is something we use to help see who stands out.
Ok… let’s get started.
(If you would not like to be considered for a MOTM, please PM me the @erlangforums account to let us know.)
and we’re sure none of these will come as a surprise to you…
Back when I wanted to sign up for GitHub, my name was already taken, so I had to come up with something 
