I just realized I never replied to this:
J.Kougar
Yea, I was hoping the contests would do more. I gave away more than 4 Million Gold out of pocket in contests over the course of a week or two here not long ago, and I'd have easily given much more than that if I thought it would help, but despite it they just didn't seem to draw in enough people.
People blame me for my lack of activity, but I'm not the active popular guy I was so many years ago, and as such my activity here really doesn't do anything to draw in people, so me trying to reschedule to make time for Gaia doesn't really help much in the long run I don't think. I try and do what I can when I can... if you have suggestions and need funding let me know... but again, thus far I'm not sure contests have done much, and I guess I don't have the time or ideas to offer much more.
Garek is the man, he's the one who will solve all our problems with his god-like powers. 3nodding
To be honest, J., I don't think your presence here was necessarily what drew people in. I don't mean that in a bad way! I just mean that they were probably looking at this guild being the largest, having some activity, and probably it was the only one of a few furry guilds.
Now we have to compete with others, which don't seem as active but have knocked us out of the rankings. I just searched for "furry" and "furries" in the guilds menu. We're on page two after several role playing guilds, several of which are not furry specific at all. One's just a neko role playing guild.
We need better guild tags if that can be edited. Include "furry, furries, anthro, anthropomorphic, roleplay, & chat" at the least.
It seems the name of the guild isn't helping as much as previously thought. There seems to be a lot of issues taken with it, so maybe we should rework the name so it still says AFG. (Absolute Furry Guild? I think Adult helped define our image, but I don't know if it would benefit or not with a change.) Just no "the". (And personally I'd like to see a redesign of our image [banners etc] to be more professional but have the same friendly feel. Perhaps have a design discussion and develope an appropriate text-based logo (icons and things could be okay, but would have to recede from the dominant identity of us being AFG, the oldest, longest lasting furry guild on gaia).
Aside from our image and name, we need more activity and I think we may be able to encourage it more by pulling in role playing crowd, if there's not enough here.
An idea that was used once before was paying users for having the AFG banner in their signatures. We could re-institute this as a small gift for users to keep it in their signatures. It would have to be a small gift to discourage abuse and anyone who agrees gets their name added to a list to prevent abuse.
I think we're on the right track so far. We just need to keep it up. We're getting more activity now than we used to, and now that summer is starting up or has started, we need to step up our efforts to grab people's attention.
Oh, and I have no powers.
razz I'm just a simple ol' wuff who's trying to help out.
Edit: Actually, we really need to discuss the overall feel of the guild. Just to preempt this, Imma start a thread for user input.