Hello everyone, Dar here, your second-in-command. We talked about it before and we decided to make out a list of things we're going to implement into the forums and into the community here, things to look out of, the status of this place, all that good jazz. It was in the best interest that we would do this annually at the start of the year, doing this the first month (with some smaller updates scattered throughout the year.) This is what will be known as the State of the Moon Kingdom Address. So let's begin, shall we?
Stats and Figures
So it goes to point out we've been getting quite of bit of traffic for the forums, which is good! Since we moved, our pageviews have went from 38k to 118K since the end of December. Initially this was increasing November but we took a hit the following month. We gained 60 new members since then which is now at a total of 128 now. Our largest topic is the The Last Poster and we have several Klonoa-based projects going on now.
The Status of the Staff
As of now, there are six on staff on the forums with some additional help with writing articles and such from others for the front page elsewhere. As such, I want to consider getting more on staff to write some Klonoa-related articles if any are interested. As it is, I feel that we're a bit overwhelmed at the moment--a lot of us are busy in school/college/university and whatnot. I myself am back, but not nearly as much as I used to be due to my job. As it is, we might be looking into getting more moderators in the future.
The State of the Fansite
In a word--it could use more work. The forums are thriving. That's great! That's good. The fansite? I will admit I haven't been able to attend to it as much, but I would like to make that change. As stated before I would like some feedback on what we can do to make this a better place, especially the front page. It seems no one knows it exists and that's a shame. We want to change this. If anyone's interested in becoming a writer for us please send some inquiries to me via PM. The front page as it is needs more content. We need ideas. We need you.
Planning for the Future
As some of you may or may not heard we DO have some big plans on events for the forum. First I want to announce that we will be doing contests! Yes, soon enough we have some plans for some contests throughout the year, in different things. It's not all out in stone yet, but some ideas will pertain to creative contests, meaning it could be artwork, animation, writing, crafts, etc. I'll be funding these contests, meaning that it will either be monetary rewards or something of a gift card or something that can be ordered on Amazon or the like.
I also want to announce that we will have some events that people can participate in. The first event I want to announce is the Phantomile vs. Lunatea event which be held this March and it will be held for a month. It'll be set where each member can choose a side to root for score points for said side but posting and whatnot. Again, this is something I'm still in process of ironing out, so it's not quite set in stone (it's hard for me to come up with ideas at the moment when I'm not at home as much anymore :\) but once we get closer to March you'll know more about it.
As for redesigning the forums, SMF has a beta for 2.1 which would have mobile support but at the moment many modifications that we use now aren't going to work for it yet, so for now mobile support will come, but not for a while. As for the site, if anyone's interested in that, again, let me know and we'll go from there. I know some of the plugins I use on the front site are broke for some reason and I don't have a replacement for them yet. I've really neglected it. :\
The last thing I wanna bring up is making some "holidays" for us. Last year, we had a National Moo Day made by our members. We liked this idea so much we decided to add that to our event calender every year. Again, if you guys have any ideas that you think might be fun for the community feel free to shoot a message to either me or Aura.
