rs evangelist under consideration

Howdy gang.

I realized today that other than this site, I don't really visit any other anime websites on a regular basis. In fact, I can only name a handful of other anime websites... especially web boards.

So my crazy random idea is this: creating a Rubberslug Evangelist position similar to a moderator position. I just thought of this about 30 seconds ago so I'm just throwing it out. However, there is currently no way to inform the people who don't visit our site on a regular basis of the things we do here that they might find useful.

Take for instance our new background gallery. Great idea, but I'd like for everyone -- including people who are not members of our community -- to benefit.

So to those of you who visit this site as merely one stop in your daily rounds at a dozen other anime/collecting websites, does this sound like something you'd want to do? There is unfortunately no perks to the job other than probably an icon near your name and being part of the inner circle when we consider what features to develop next.

At the very least, would a small link graphic and or Rubberslug banners be of use to anyone who runs websites outside of their gallery here?

I don't know how much good this kind of thing will end up being. There is a very limited scope of the anime-collecting population that collect cels. I think a lot of the people that are going to know about the site, and its features, probably already do. Then again, there are still people that are getting into the hobby...

Another thing to consider is a lot of the places might consider posting info about the website in a community spam...

Ah, okay. Good point.

I didn't phrase that right. I intended the position to be more guided feedback rather than just a human bullhorn. Someone who already talks to lots of collectors and just tells me what people want so I can work on things people want.

Cel collecting is a really small percentage of people. I'm thinking that the main problem I see with attracting people to this site is my fault entirely. I don't have working relationships with webmasters of other similar sites.

It's not that I don't want to. I just don't have time to spend an hour a day on each popular board. I used to talk to David from Anime Beta and we'd swap little stories about the difficulties in creating anime communities. He was a really cool guy and worked hard to make AB a fun community. I know a lot of people there are members here so I try to post there if our site crashes (like last winter).

So, I'd like to not be a weird little island that people visit for one thing -- a free website -- and have discussions elsewhere. We have about 150-200 members who log in at least once every 3-4 days but only the 15-20 that are vocal are shaping the future of this website. That's great for those folks but I don't want to ignore everyone else.

The only thing I appreciate more than donations is good suggestions. Seriously.

I like to think of this as an oasis, rather than a "weird little island".

It seems that the main goal of this position would be to better foster the community of cel collectors in general. It seems that you it so there aren?t so many faceless people with nice cel collections, and more people who ramble about stuff. I think this is a great goal. I?m all about fostering community. Somebody needs to be out there when I want to rant about the cool new cel I found on Yahoo!Japan?

I don?t know about the places that you guys go to, but most of the boards I visit outside this one are generally sales related. Both the Animanga forum and the cel collectors? blog on LiveJournal seem to act as such. It seems that the posts in these places that aren?t sales related are either ?Show Me? threads or some random topic. But none of these places have stuff as cool as ?The Invincible Lobster Machine?!

I think that the best thing we can do is attempt to come up with more fun stuff to talk about. I think ?Introduce Yourself? thread was the one that got me to start to speak up. I think that if people think it is safe to de-lurk then they will be more likely to join in with the community. I think if we can solve the problems with the lurkers, then discussions and the suggestions will become a lot better?

I don?t know if this ramble is helping any, so how about a proposed suggestion to end this? Would it be possible to have a picture on the individual gallery sections? This way it could be possible to either put the series logo on the gallery or some other picture on each section. I don?t know if this is even feasible, but think it would be cool to have the series logo displayed on the page with the cels?