Community Involvement

This is a copy of a recent forum post. I wanna create more community involvement in the forums and help the site help itself grow. It's up to the users to make the torque products more user friendly. I going to start with the TGB but hopefully this becomes popular and we can expand this competition to other formats. Read on for specifics...

I want to start a Last Man Standing competition to create more community involvement. This competition would encourage users to learn the torque behavior system. Future contests will encourage users to learn different systems to get everyone more familiar with all torque systems. All code for the competition will be displayed so people can learn multiple ways of reaching a similar goal.

The contest will be in Last Man Standing format so that the difficulty can be ramped up each round. Rounds would last a week long and contest will last 3-5 rounds depending on community involvement. Each Contest will have an extra credit tasks that can be judged in the case of a tie or tough decision but are not required. The reason behind this is because code is pretty finite it either works or doesn't so the judging can't be solely judged on function. Each extra credit task will have a certain amount points associated with it based on difficulty. There will also be at least one extra credit task that will inspire creativity or innovation just in case of the exceptionally rare tie situation. As far as difficulty, The first task will always be beginner level and ramp up to intermediate, hard, and so on so forth.

Now ideally it would be nice if GG employees could help with the voting and enter the competition themselves. It would show there support to community and that they encourage people to help the selves learn. After the contests are over the whole community benefits and a tutorial can easily be written up for the TDN. I know prizes cost money or sponsorships and sponsorships can have undesired results. So as an alternative to prizes (unless prizes are a valid option) we could design badges that participants and winners could display in their profile. The badges would represent the dedication to the community the participants display and give them a since of accomplishment.

I'd like to kick this off as soon as possible if people are interested because it can be very beneficial. If successful this contest can spread to the other engines and may draw more users to the site, especially if people can link there successes to their personal web pages and online portfolios for the web to see. All I need an interest base and people who want to enter. I'll then set up the first competition. and before we know it we'll on the 12th competition. Please post comments in the TGB Behavior thread or this .plan.