Winners
Thanks everyone for participating! The site looks a lot better than it did a couple months ago.
I've compiled the results and rolled some dice. Per the contest I owe 2 games, but I'm awarding 3 as the third challenge was pretty darn close.
The winners are
- beam022
- Monica Cellio
- Pureferret
You three have a choice of the following games
Thunderstone: more or less complete. All expansions included, although I don't have any promos that might have been released. All the sets fit into 2 boxes, the other boxes have been repurposed so you won't be getting those, just the cards & rules.
- Armada - Now you can own one of the worst rated games at BGG!
- Munchkin: Pretty sure there is an expansion set or two in there, but I can't identify them. It's been too long, so no promises!
- Shark (Ravensburger ed): I dug this game out of storage to answer a question on this site. Next time, you can have this pleasure! Actually this is a pretty cool game.
- Lost Worlds collection: I have about 12 books, most still shrink wrapped. You get them all.
If the 3 winners could drop me an email at havoc@boldo.com that would be great. Include your postal address and the top 3 choices and I'll get them in the mail as soon as I can. If I don't hear from you in a couple days I may not be able to get your game to you until after Christmas, things are getting busy around here!
Thanks again to everyone!
Folks, it's go time!
The six weeks between mid December and the end of January have been very good to us over the last couple years. How good? Try 2x! Visits have doubled during each of those periods. Better yet, we've kept that level of traffic each year and continued to build upon it.
I see Christmas is being held again this year so I have no reason to suspect that it won't happen again! That gives us 60 days to put our best foot forward.
The Goal
Get launched! Take a look at all of the StackExchange sites sorted by traffic. At a high level I notice a couple things
- Above 5k visits/day most sites are launched
- Below 4.5k visits/day most sites are not launched
- Our traffic is currently 2.3k visits/day
I haven't spoken to and SE staff about this, but it looks like that if our traffic can double we will be right in the sweet spot where the question switches from, "When are we going to launch?" to "Why aren't we launched already?" I'd like to force the question, who's with me?
Sounds good, what can we do now?
Here are my ideas, please comment and expand!
Vote early, vote often!
One slightly disturbing trend I've noticed this year is a decrease in voting. Since the end of January we've increased traffic by 2x. Unfortunately, during that time, voting has decreased by 50%. Taken together votes per visit was 4x higher at the beginning of the year. I think we can do better, lets reward people that contribute to this site by asking good questions and giving great answers.
Note - I'm not encouraging anyone to blindly upvote everything they come across. Take a moment, evaluate the question or answer and then up or down vote appropriately.
Badges:
- Electorate: One of the easiest gold badges to receive.
- Sportsmanship - Vote for answers that aren't yours. Only one person with this hard to get silver badge.
- Vox Populi - a copper badge that only 13 people have. Anyone can obtain this with one day's worth of voting. As a bonus, if you haven't got Suffrage yet, you'll obtain that as well!
Challenge - Can we double the number of people that have these badges by the end of the year?
Spread the Word!
Not everyone has great social media connections, as I well know! That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Share an occasional link on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. I think it works best if you share one that you were involved in or that helped you directly so that you can relate your personal experiences.
If you're active on Reddit or similar sites, go ahead and drop a link where appropriate.
Badges:
- Announcer - Bronze, we only have 14 of these.
- Booster - Silver, we have but 2
- Publicist - Gold, we have 1
Challenge - Booster and Publicist are pretty hard, but can we double the Announcers?
Improve/Elaborate/expand
Editing is a largely thankless task. Fortunately we have many people who have been eager to improve posts, even ones that aren't their own. Of course there is always more we can do.
Most of our hits come right from Google. This means that people are ending up here looking for answers to their questions. This is awesome, we have to make sure they get the information they need and hopefully plant a seed of curiosity that will bring them back here when they have a question they can't find the answer to.
I believe that almost any post can be improved. While fixing spelling and obvious grammar problems have significant value, we stand to gain a lot more when a good editor strips a post down and rebuilds it in a clear, concise manner. I encourage everyone who may enjoy this to give it a try. Turnover on our front page isn't too fast and almost every edit will have other people looking at it quickly. If there's a problem, any edit can be reverted.
Badges
- Copy Editor, 500 edited posts is a lot, I'm only a bit over half way there. Can anyone beat me to it?
- Excavator - a reward for one act of helping out an older post.
- Proofreader - review other's edits.
- Research Assistant - help out our tag wikis
- Strunk and White - Edit 80 posts. 3 have been earned.
Challenge - 20 more Excavators, double the Proofreaders, S&W. Get at least 2 Research Assistants.
What do I win?
A better site for Board & Card Games. The more traffic we have, the better the answers will get. We'll also get more questions and some of them will be more interesting.
Making the world a better place. Several times over the last year I've googled questions and ended up right back here. People all over the world are doing this on a daily basis. A lot of them end up here and get quick, great answers to their questions.
Games! - Yes, I'll be giving away at least one game. If you earn one of the badges mentioned above by December 15th @ midnight CST you will be entered to win a game from my personal collection. I'll spend up to $25 shipping it to you.
I also listed 3 challenges above. For each challenge that is achieved in the same period I'll add another game to the pot. There could be a maximum of 4 winners (1 game each).
Other rules
- Rules can change at any time at my discretion. The only rule that can't change is that I will give away one game to a member of this site.
- Winner(s) to be determined at my discretion. This will likely involve me rolling dice at my desk. There may be no independent verification of results.
- Each person can only win one game
- Achieving Silver or Gold badges improves your odds of winning.
- Anyone who gets a mod message from the other mods will be disqualified. IE - don't game the system, earn the badges legitimately.
- If SE staff object to this "contest", I'll end it.
