Welcome to the April newsletter from the DragonsCavern website.

This month we have news on;

Tudor Mint News,
DragonsCavern News,
Vote results and a new vote,
Requests.
 
Tudor Mint News:
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Good news for club members at long last. The 2008 presentation piece - The Dragon's Rest - is being sent out to collectors as we speak. Club paperwork should already be with you, but if you are still without it, read on for a new feature on the DragonsCavern website that could help you.

The collectors club magazine will be available later in the year, and the Tudor Mint are looking for your articles, letters or anything that you consider of interest.
As Xystos have said on the DCforum "We are wanting/trying to make this magazine a club magazine and not just another advertising media. So any contributions/suggestions will be welcome." In previous issues of the Meth Times there was a collector who wrote fantastic stories based around the studies. If you know of him (or are him!) please keep writing those stories, and sending them in.

More good news too. Last month Xystos asked collectors for their views on what we'd like to see at future Extravaganzas. Well, you left lots of comments in the DCforum, and mentioned ideas like;

Pre – ordered Extravaganza / members only pieces
Meet the designers
View the process of making a model
Sidestall events
Tombola
Lucky Dip
Design a model competition
Members only prize draw
Club shop to buy studies
Club shop to buy other memorabilia
Secondary traders area
Members only competitions (member card proof required)
Limited sales of advanced studies
Dedicated children’s events / area
Spares and replacements shop (crystals / bases / nameplate engraving)
Myth and Magic- a history; 1989 – 2008.
Q and A session.

and we're pleased to say that Xystos listened to your ideas and are hoping to include many of them at the 2008 Extravaganza to be held on August 10th at Alton Towers (tickets priced at £5).

Xystos are looking for a serious collector who would be willing to take either all or some of their collection to the Extravaganza, and take part in a Q&A session about why they collect, how they started, what their first piece was, etc.  If you're a serious collector, and would like to be part of the Extravaganza contact Xystos - via the Ask Xystos DCforum feature (see below) stating your interest.


DragonsCavern News:
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The DCforum has a brand new area called "Ask Xystos". In this area The Tudor Mint will answer questions you may have about the studies, the company, or (for club members) issues with yout membership. A member of staff from the TM is already answering questions and sorting out issues collectors have raised.

Here's a tip for the forum too. If you can't keep track of the latest postings, the RSS feature at the bottom of the main page allows you to view all the latest posts in a date organised list. Very handy when you're not sure what has been added to the forum. This works with one click in Firefox V2, IE7 and Safari very easily, but Opera browsers need to set up the 'feed' feature. We've added a page on the blog comparing the four browsers as feed readers.
Check it out here; http://blog.dragonscavern.co.uk/using_feeds.html

Have you heard the blog recently? Yes, we did say heard because now you can listen to the latest articles as they are spoken to you. Above new articles you'll see a "listen now" button. Click this and a clever piece of technology will analyse the text and then read it out to you. Thanks to this feature you can now subscribe to the Podcast feed of the blog, and have the latest DC news downloaded to your mp3 player enabling you to listen whilst out and about.

That's not the only improvement we've been working on within the blog this month. In addition to that we now have the facility to send the blog directly to your mobile phone. You will notice a new button below the latest headlines on the website main page, as well as to the right of the scrolling eBay links within the blog, that says "make it mobile". Click this to choose three options on how to receive the blog on your phone. You can either copy the URL into the phones browser, enter your phone number into the on screen form, or (for Nokia users) scan the barcode. Simplicity itself! We are currently looking at improving the whole mobile version of our website to make it more appealing to users.

In the subscribers section of the website we've recently added issues 39 and 40 of the club magazine. That now means we have issues 1 - 40 all available to view, and only issue 41 (with Mr. Hughes letter to collectors) and issue 42 (the final issue) from the Watsons days still to come. Of course, we won't be adding those issues until at least this time next year as per our agreement with the Tudor Mint.

We have a favour to ask collectors. Have you noticed that on some of our pages, we are missing the data about the designer of a study. If you have one of those studies, we would be grateful if you could look underneath it, and email us with the details of the designer.

Thanks to those people who have sent us photos of the stories related to the Tudor Mint chess sets. We're still looking for the rest of them, so if you have any of the Tudor Mint Chess sets, do you have the poster that explains the significance of each piece in the set? We'd be grateful for a photo in order to read the text.
Thank you in advance!

To access the subscribers section of the website use your username and password

Voting:
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Last time on DragonsCavern.co.uk we asked you; Are less new releases a good idea? The results are;

Yes 91.67%
No  08.33%

For April we are asking; Should you be able to join the collectors club through a store?

Take part in the vote using the buttons on the main page, or in the contact or vote sections. Results will be announced in the May newsletter.

Requests:
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If you have a prototype study, or a rare version of any item please send it to us for inclusion on the prototypes/rare pages. Use the submit form on the contact page of the website. In addition to this, the 'wanted' page of the website lists studies that we are looking for images for. If you are able to help with those, please contact us.

That's all for this month. If you have any news, websites, announcements or comments that you would like to see in the next newsletter, or if you are a trader / collector who would like to be featured in an article in a future newsletter, please contact the webmanager.

Sincerely ,
Webmanager
DragonsCavern.co.uk - the unofficial Myth and Magic collection histories chart.