I love the idea of contests. Yes to all of the above contest suggestions. The avatar ones we did last time were fun. Grow-alongs and craft-alongs are fun, too. I kind of remember that we had an avocado grow-a-long a long time ago that several people participated in. Tomatoes could be fun.
I've been holding out on a contest idea I have had. I'll explain the idea and then I'll explain why I haven't acted on it yet. I found this website,
CarbonRally, which has several different eco-friendly challenges and the estimated amount of CO2 a person would avoid generating by participating in the challenge. Participants can register with the site (just needs an e-mail, no personal info) and get a profile that tracks the participant's progress toward current goals and estimated total savings. Participants can also form teams and track the team's CO2 savings. There are tons of leader boards (top weekly team, individual, top individual within the team etc.) I was thinking we could create a team page and profiles and award prizes here based on our team leader board there. I created a
profile for me and tried the site out. The challenges range in difficulty and cost, so there are things everyone could try. The site functions fairly well. I opted out of all the e-mails and wasn't hit with any spam. The community seems reasonably active and positive. The only real drawback (other than it is outside of Gaia and I don't know how everyone feels about that) is that the devs seem to have abandoned it about a year ago. The links to their blog are dead. There have been no new official challenges since last March. (There are, however, many unofficial challenges posted by users in the workshop that we could work with if we wanted, and many existing official challenges open to choose from.) I just don't know if they plan on keeping the lights on or if one day it will just be gone with no warning. I could port pieces of it into a thread of our own here and cut them out entirely, but it would take a LOT of work (and I would have to scale the thing way down to make it feasible). Or, we could just set up a team there (with an explanation and prize thread here) and see what happens. Assuming enough people here are interested, of course. Thoughts?
As for the subforums, I like them and would vote they stay open. I agree, though, that we have been focusing a bit too much attention on one thread while ignoring the main (and sub) forums a
bit lot. I don't mind posting in the main forum for now to get some discussions going if you want. I don't think I get notifications for guild topics (at least that I remember or pay attention to) unless I am quoted and then I see that someone has quoted me. I do recall seeing notifications now and then about somebody joining the guild.
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