100 Members, New Year Notions

[SLWalker]

Ad Astra's main archive now has 100 members!  Not shabby, aye?  I've been chewing over what to do when we reached this milestone.

Here are some of my thoughts (open to any or all feedback):

1.) Potential section mods.  These would be people who would pick 2 of the 10 sections (not counting Meta, I'll handle that), where they would be in charge of tallying up new reviews for that section, promoting it to advance its growth, approving or rejecting submissions (for quality control) and otherwise keeping things running smoothly.

The upside to this is that it would take pressure off of the administration -- review counting the entire site can and does take hours of time.  It's done manually, too.  As section mods, the mod would only have to tally up new reviews for their section and send me a tally sheet at the end of the two week period.

The downside to this is that you'd have to come up with a system to do so, and be willing to do it faithfully.

Whatever the first category is in the story header is the one that will be used, so if something is, say, Crossovers, Original Series, Next Generation, then it would fall under Crossovers.

Some of the things, though, that a mod would be allowed to do (aside promotion, rejection/validation) would be come up with neat little in-section contests and that.  The regular review hunt would remain the same, but, say, the mod could have a top monthly reviewer in their own section(s) and a little button or banner could be added to their profile.  Or, a custom page could be added to the archive highlighting those groups.

Mods could also be allowed to come up with in-section challenges, or coordinate with other mods to have crossover challenges.  The two-week whole-site challenge would remain the same, but this opens up potential for specific challenges posed by mods on behalf of their section.

The possibilities for contests and that are pretty endless.  Promotion and having fun being the key there.

So, what does everyone think?  This would be an after New Year thing, so feel free to chew it over and whatnot here, discuss, see if we want to go that route.

2.) Site theme!  My graphics contingent (you people handy with PS and that) can design a prospective banner for next year on Ad Astra.  My qualifications are that it a.) look good and clean b.) be typeset well.  Our current banner has the correct proportions, and since it'd be used for both site and forum, you'd have to leave space where the greeting, messages, show unread, show new replies is, as you can see above.

So, those interested in doing graphics work, have a crack at it.  Let's see what you've got.

Anyway, those are my pre-New Years thoughts.  What have you got?

[Miranda Fave]

Cool! A hundred members. That's quite a landmark. Plus has anyone noticed we are getting a heck of a lot of visits too. Or is that just me - but the most online number seems to be quite high these last few days. Maybe just the funk I am in. But double checking it I see it was 51 yesterday!

[SLWalker]

Cool! A hundred members. That's quite a landmark. Plus has anyone noticed we are getting a heck of a lot of visits too. Or is that just me - but the most online number seems to be quite high these last few days. Maybe just the funk I am in. But double checking it I see it was 51 yesterday!

Our Google analytics show we have pretty steady growth, very high visitor loyalty.  There was a dropoff when the buzz from the movie died down, but overall trending is fairly steadily increasing.

[kes7]

I noticed that too and was actually thinking of asking about it.  It always happens in the early morning around the same time ... I was wondering if maybe it's just a glitch in the way the site counts users, like maybe there's someone who opens different topics in multiple tabs or windows or something, and it's showing up as multiple users?

I'd love to think we're getting all that traffic, but it seems odd to me that it's always around the same time that it happens.  ???

[MDGarcia]

kes7:

It's not a glitch.  Google Analytics knows how to distinguish between page views from same visitor and doesn't factor that in for visitor loyalty stats.

MDg

[SLWalker]

I noticed that too and was actually thinking of asking about it.  It always happens in the early morning around the same time ... I was wondering if maybe it's just a glitch in the way the site counts users, like maybe there's someone who opens different topics in multiple tabs or windows or something, and it's showing up as multiple users?

I'd love to think we're getting all that traffic, but it seems odd to me that it's always around the same time that it happens.  ???

If you mean the forums, it might be search indexers, too.  But that doesn't change the Google-analytics part of it.   Which is that we're doing pretty good.  Hence the proposals and that.

[MDGarcia]

Actually, we don't count the forums in our analytics.  At least, I never activated it for forums.

MDg