This is just a list of examples of changes that we may want to consider. All of these are opinions and idea, so please don't take any of them as an offense towards any existing thing to AF atm.
Competitions:
As everyone was speaking of different competitions, we could set each one to be both community and staff based depending on the seriousness of the contest.
We could do separate contests for different categories, which we can create when competitions actually start.
Prizes are one of the most “difficult” things to apply to these kind of contests. Although we can't really give physical prizes (since you and me both know that none of us are just made of money ) we can always increase the competitiveness of the badge and level up system on the forum in order to get a much more active event criteria. (i will get onto badges and the level up system later)
Ideas of contests: Drawing (can involve anything from anime genre all the way to games and movies, exedra), Writing, scripting, making a play, writing a song, devising your own game, best role play, performances, best meme, best post wins, cuteness contest….. Yeah, we can have a lot of contests. That's less of a concern to me then most, since we will always be able to gain contest ideas.
I would say that allowing maybe 2-3 members of staff to work on these projects, since overcrowding it may get a bit too complicated and it kind of ruins the fun of a “contest” if you have 10 staff members working on it and only 12 members (meaning that staff are more likely to win )
I was also wondering if we should make a new subsection on the anime forums for the different competitions so it's easier to keep progress. I don't know about you all, but when ryuji did the old writing contests it got pretty confusing on where you had to go to check the results and see the old posts and whatnot
As always with these kind of things, we will need to take upvotes on who would like to see these kind of contests go down and whatnot, so i may make a thread to tally up the amount of people who would vote for this kind of thing (remember, although most of us want this kind of thing, i was wondering if we should make it more public as well, since let's be fair, a contest has to have at least 10 or more contenders to feel really tense and more of a competition! Obviously we can still do it with less, but it's more likely you will win out of 5 people )
Community builds:
As far as the community side of things go, we have made a pretty good name for ourselves. So, what i was thinking, is we could kind of show that off a bit
Now, for a front page style show off, we could do a couple of things. One of these which i was thinking off would be an upvoted member of the month (or even random, just to make people feel special more than anything ^w^) and that member will have a little crown for the month .
Another thing that could be added is stuff like AF’s best moments of the year, and highlight a couple of your personal things that you loved optic this could also be a good use of the chat, since we can make “ AF’s top 10 sentences of the year”. Let's be honest, this kind of thing would happily spur up memories in existing members whilst granting newer members an insight into our craziness
This can also be extended with things such as showing off the most active community members and so on.
Posting on the forums:
One way to increase the amount of posts i feel would be to give some people more creative elements in the forums creation section. This could include allot more of a tool-system which they could use to monitor over and make individual threads with.
Although this part is not as big of a concern, i also think it would be amazing if we could just upload images onto threads or the chat rather than using the URL. it takes WAY too much effort to go and look for a url when you could just copy and paste or upload an image.
Individual sections: (IK, but hear me out ):
When i said about my own corner, i got an even better idea. Since we already have the anime forum team, how about we make a subsection for individual members to post their stuff and manage their own part of AF in order to give out a creative freedom. Obviously, before everyone goes on about “ each individual member means so much space” thing, i was thinking we do a system where the individual has to ask optic to become a member of staff for this section (not sure what to call the staff members yet. Maybe the corner crew or something). Once you have proven you are worthy to work in this section, you get your own little bit that you can manage and create what you please in. this could provide a lot more creativity and feedback side of things to the forum for the off topic section, and allow small things to grow. E.G: Kirys signature art, metro’s photography… exedra.
Now, i can also understand the obvious argument of : THis not being anything to do with the original point of AF being an “anime forum”. Well, i can kind of counter this with the argument of this allowing community members who are willing to dedicate the time into AF to try and give both a better draw and to feel apart of a community. It also allows us all working on this segment to have the ability to teach people things like the anime artstyle and whatnot as well as scripting or photography or blah blah blah.
Also, i cant stress on the fact that members here have to be dedicated and kept to a minimum, since i can easily understand that with too many members it would just get overcrowded quickly. This would also mean allowing only the member responsible for their bit to be able to post threads there. So allowing us to kind of moderate our own bits will be crucial, but also means that those given this opportunity MUST be trustworthy and upvoted by both optic and the community.
Well, that all i got for now sorry that it's not much.
