HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

Hey guys, JR here and I have a question to ask y’all.

When I posted the most recent Character Of The Week, I posited the idea of bringing it back as a weekly blog post, rather than a sporadic thing posted when I feel like it, and the response has been pretty affirmative. So, I think COTW will now take up a place on the blog each Friday. However, one of the things that a number of people have said is that they’d like to see more topical posts on the blog, like there were last summer. My question is, is this a feeling that is shared by the majority?

Now I’m certainly willing to do more stuff, I have a bit of free time at the moment, and Kaldath has said that he’d be willing to do more than just the Caption Contest, but the thing is, we’re not exactly sure what to do. I had a load of topics going last summer, but apart from the Big Question, there wasn’t much response to many of them and even the interest in the Big Question waned after a while (although I stopped it because I had ran out of topics I wanted to discuss/ felt it was worth discussing). The same goes for the topics Kaldath used to run, such as the Anime Talks, Poll Position or the redesign contests. The problem here is, we can’t tell how popular a topic/ blog series is. There isn’t a view counter/ page visit counter that we can just look at, so we can’t tell how many times a certain post has been viewed and the only way we can gauge a response is through comments left and, if we’re being honest, the only posts that ever get above 10 comments are the Character Design Contests, which won’t be going anywhere anyway. If we were to bring back old topics or start up new ones, it would need to be a two way street. We can’t keep giving you content if there’s no response to it, it just feels like “why are we even bothering if no-one’s looking at it”. You get where I’m coming from?

Then we have the problem of what topics do you want. I will admit I messed up the last weekly blog post I tried to get started, the Sharing Day Video Posts. Problem there was at the time I was finishing off uni, so I didn’t have all that much time to do them in and when I did get time, something would always prevent me doing them properly, so one week I ended up not posting it and then I just fell off the ball and it went away. I could bring that back if people are interested, because I seem to remember there was a bit of interest in that. As for other stuff, you guys will have to tell us what you want. We can bring back some old topics (Big Question, What Were They Thinking, Sci-Fi Corner, Anime Talk etc.) or we could do something new, which you can give out some ideas. We could even change up a few of the old topics, for example maybe instead of Sci-Fi Corner there could be a Fantasy based blog series, discussing fantasy tropes and topics (though Kaldath would probably have to do this one, I think he’s a bit more up on fantasy than I am). The one thing I’m not open to bringing back as a weekly series is the Power User Profiles. I originally only intended to do a limited 5 profile series, but my inner-fanboy got a hold and I ended up adding 15 or so names to the list of PUP’s, so I think it’s best we leave that alone for the moment. I’m not saying it’s gone for good, but at the moment I can’t think of anyone who I really want to profile and I don’t want to force it. Besides, with the forums down I don’t have an easy way of contacting people and asking if they would like to do a profile. And finally, and this really is hypothetical and I’m going to completely blindside Jeff and Kaldath with this one, really this will be their call if it were to happen, but I quite like the idea of community submissions. Now, a couple of months back, Herr D sent me over a review of some of the foreign language versions of Let It Go from Disney’s Frozen and, after sending it over to Kaldath, we featured it on the blog. I really like the idea of having community members being featured on the blog, it makes the whole thing more interactive. Of course, we’d have to figure out a way to do this, the stuff featured would have to be topics related to stuff the site deals with (comics, sci-fi, fantasy etc.) and each week one submission would be chosen by the moderators to be featured, rather than just giving everyone permission to post on the blog, because that would be anarchy. This is of course, completely hypothetical at the moment, and if the forums weren’t down I’d have run the idea by Kaldath first, so don’t get your hopes up, it might not happen.

Anyway, sorry for the long rambling post. Let us know what you think about the whole blog post situations, if you would like to see more weekly posts and if so, what?