Running SWAG

As of right now there are... 83 new pieces of artwork on SWAG since the Beta site was actually opened to the public. CCR Submitted one piece for me before that time, so that puts the total at 84 pieces of art, the vast majority of which was all submitted since August 9th... That's more than 2 pieces of art per day!

I find this all amazing and VERY encouraging. After more than 2 years of being offline, I was moderately afraid that there'd be nothing to come back to after rebuilding, but you all have allayed my fears and what's more, you've really made FANTASTIC contributions. So, while many of you have spent the last few weeks thanking me for my work on this project, let me take this time to thank all of you for responding to it, and actually doing what it takes to make SWAG successful... namely submitting new art and looking at each other's art.

With this all in mind, I'm going to discuss a little bit about what I've done to help start SWAG on a path to power. SWAG has nearly 2000 members. The vast majority of these people are not guild members (obviously) and I'll be opening up the site for new user applications soon, so that number should begin to increase shortly. However, we want to have one of the strongest, largest most high quality Star Wars communities on the net, so I've done somethings that I hope will start to attract new users.

If you're reading this, then there's a pretty fair chance you've noticed the blogs. :-) Seeing as how this is my blog, that makes good sense to me. hehe... The blogs are offered to all guild members as a guild member only perk. This area can be used both to display Work In Progress, as well as just a typical blog. This can attract great high quality users for a number of reasons, not the least of which is just pure content. The higher quality content that you all put up on your blogs, the more attractions we'll get for those topics.

Secondly you may have noticed that I've given members (of all shapes and sizes) the ability to comment on images. This is again a potential repository of not only great images, but great content about those images. The same thing is true of the blogs.

And finally, we have the forums, as we've always had. I wish I could have transfered all the old forum content, but it didn't make sense to delay the site for such a thing. We'll just have to start that process over at this point. We're making GREAT tracks around here, and I'm hoping to automate a few more things. Once those are all done we'll be back to doing what we've always been doing and we can focus on doings some fun new things. Let me know if you see anything lacking on the site. I know I'm still bug-hunting a few things, but we should make it through all this stuff soon. You all make this site worth running, I hope I can make it a place worth spending your time.

Eclipse