Member of the month or member of the week?
- Thread starter Fergal
- Start date
It would really depend on the size and age of the forum. I've seen many member of the months, but not so many members of the week. I think members of the month would be best, because if gives members any entire month to battle it out and prove just which of them is the best and most active member, that month.
Neither.
In my experience, MotM/MotW are terrible ideas. All they seem to do is promote elitism, favouritism and annoyance among members.
Especially when people just keep voting for the same people every time. (Or same rotation of people if you limit how often people can win.) This leads to the sense of elitism where if the same few keep winning over and over again it tends to scare off others.
And if your site is smaller or these awards happen more frequently then this will become an issue much faster since you have smaller pool of people to vote on and vote. (Plus if you run this more frequently it will cause burnout and people will likely stop voting after the first few because they're happening too frequently and it's turning into work.)
Not to mention that actually getting people to vote in the first place is often like pulling teeth. (You might be able to do it, but it's going to hurt.)
From a staff perspective, this lack of voting tends to be rather worrying. I've seen many admins with these rack their brains trying to get more people involved when the message is that these people don't want to be a part of the MotM selection decision.
Furthermore they frequently are a time-suck for admins. Admins funnel all this time into making MotM's, preparing voting lists and all this stuff and then players don't even care. So all the time is effectively wasted. Where it could have been better spend on doing more useful things like posting.
On roleplay sites, MotM sometimes are usually featured in sidebars... Though that often ends up with even more issues since then the winners are highlighted even more. Plus a lot of rpers dislike this whole MotM system because of the glorified popularity contest notion. (Though many dislike it because putting the MotMs in sidebars just adds clutter to a site and may affect site loading speed if too many large images are used. And these MotMs show that the site has more of a focus on being pretty/popular than writing.)
At the end of the day these are just popularity contests more than anything. And in my experience they only harm your site more than help.
In my experience, MotM/MotW are terrible ideas. All they seem to do is promote elitism, favouritism and annoyance among members.
Especially when people just keep voting for the same people every time. (Or same rotation of people if you limit how often people can win.) This leads to the sense of elitism where if the same few keep winning over and over again it tends to scare off others.
And if your site is smaller or these awards happen more frequently then this will become an issue much faster since you have smaller pool of people to vote on and vote. (Plus if you run this more frequently it will cause burnout and people will likely stop voting after the first few because they're happening too frequently and it's turning into work.)
Not to mention that actually getting people to vote in the first place is often like pulling teeth. (You might be able to do it, but it's going to hurt.)
From a staff perspective, this lack of voting tends to be rather worrying. I've seen many admins with these rack their brains trying to get more people involved when the message is that these people don't want to be a part of the MotM selection decision.
Furthermore they frequently are a time-suck for admins. Admins funnel all this time into making MotM's, preparing voting lists and all this stuff and then players don't even care. So all the time is effectively wasted. Where it could have been better spend on doing more useful things like posting.
On roleplay sites, MotM sometimes are usually featured in sidebars... Though that often ends up with even more issues since then the winners are highlighted even more. Plus a lot of rpers dislike this whole MotM system because of the glorified popularity contest notion. (Though many dislike it because putting the MotMs in sidebars just adds clutter to a site and may affect site loading speed if too many large images are used. And these MotMs show that the site has more of a focus on being pretty/popular than writing.)
At the end of the day these are just popularity contests more than anything. And in my experience they only harm your site more than help.
Unless you have lots and lots of active members, weekly won't work and you'll run out of members. Monthly does just fine for most boards these days, and it gives people more time in the 'spotlight' while they're in the MOTM group than just for a week. Makes it desired more.
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