I think we should reopen the Topic of the week?.
I know that the last three week of TOW doesn't got any question. But we should retry it with some broader topics such as the-hobbit week should be converted to LOTR franchise question.
There are good movies are coming, so we should retry it.
What you say?
Topic of the Week was a combination of stealing ideas and wanting to promote the site in a way feasible for us.
In the last few weeks, no one was asking a thing for the TotW and we were still rising in all our A51 stats, showing the push was not needed. Take that in combination with the fact that (at least myself) have been a bit busy as of late with work and other RL commitments that I was not able to keep up to date with the TotW and failed in communicating that to the other mods.
However, I feel we don't need it for the time being. Our traffic is on a steady incline, a few downward slopes here and there but nothing that doesn't get recovered and then doubled in a time being.
Honestly, my future goal with TotW is to get it solidified for about 6 months at a time, get an actual prize for each winner each week, instantiate some rules about participation to prevent the same user from winning over and over again, etc.
It was a good run and we learned a lot from it on how to run an internalized contest. I hope that when we come out of Beta, we can provide the users with an actual competition and at the same time drive some even fresher blood to our site!
It seems to me that the purpose of Topic of the Week is to generate questions, but when it fails to do that it makes the site look "unattended." Whenever a new movie comes out, it naturally becomes a topic of the week, so there is probably no need to make special notice of it as a TOW.
I think if we try to push a topic, we probably have to be prepared with a few questions to get it rolling. And maybe we shouldn't try to do it every week, but only when the news/movie cycle has something related to help build interest. For example, with the new Lincoln movie coming out, it would be cool if between us we could post 3 or more questions within a short space of time about different president movies (without announcing it as TOW), just to get people thinking about president movies they have seen. Life of Pi could spawn a series of questions about movies that feature animals or the role of CGI in current filmography or the role of a narrator in film. The release of The Hobbit could relate to a series of questions about film production in different countries - the things that studios in different countries are good at.
Of course, this is a a pushy suggestion coming from one who has yet to ask a question!
