Wednesday, February 22, 2006

the 2006 Mellies

God knows why, but for some reason this week RHPT and Jim D started asking me this week "Whatever happened to the Mellies?"

For those of you coming in late to the game, The League used to have lots of contests and stuff. I'd pose a question or group of questions, usually with a set of rules, and then I invited Loyal Leaguers to send in responses. We've had two or three Halloween contests, Holiday contests, one or two goes at The Mellies (a sort of all around awards) and a few other things.

I dunno. I guess at some point people quit sending in responses, so I sort of lost interest. In fact, ironically, I recall Randy pitching a fit when I asked why he hadn't participated in one of my last contests. And then my Halloween contest this year received exactly zero responses. So, anyway, that's that.

I do get comments, so I guess that's sort of made me feel that The League is plenty interactive. But even that's been a bit of a wild ride. Once you add a comments section to your blog, you really change the dynamic of the whole enterprise. There's a lot more give and take. Instant feedback lets you know what people are interested in (in my case, for some reason, everyone's always interested in my days as a high-school loser and my lack of success in various minimum wage jobs. Nobody cares about comics, that's why you don't see anymore about that here, despite the original intention of this site to be comics and pop-culture stuff).

Bottom line: Feedback makes you want to blog. When you get no comments for a while, you REALLY start to lose interest.

The biggest downside is having to police the comments section when people are feeling cranky or decide to pick a fight. I've lost some good Loyal Leaguers after tiffs in the comments section. Now, I can't say that the odd comment is what has driven their departure for sure, but, yes, a few people disappeared forever and ever once myself or someone else has disagreed with them in the the ol' comments. And that's sad, because The League is really intended to be a happy place.

I have also had the unpleasant task of occasionally removing a comment I felt was inappropriate, which I REALLY didn't want to ever have to do. I know it makes me a Nazi, but I also sometimes just don't want to deal with the headaches that I can guess are going to spiral out of the comment, not to mention private e-mails, blah blah blah. I'm always going to leave up political opinions, and I even left up one comment which gave away the ending of a movie four days into that movie's release. But if you're going to time something badly which may be hurtful to someone else, or that you've just gone a little bluer than I would normally do in front of, say, my mom, you might see the comment evaporate.

In general, I will alert the party whose comment has been taken down and then e-mail them privately as to why I took the comment down. It sucks, Leaguers. I'd love to let you all dig your own graves here, but I gotta maintain some stability.

Just FYI: There's also some folks who lurk around the League whom many of the more vocal Loyal Leaguers forget are there. My parents, my in-laws, my uncle, Jim D's mother... Lots of folks who may or may not want to hear some of the more choice stuff that might pop up on this blog if none of these people ever became aware of this site. But there it is, so we're on good behavior here.

So do I want to run the 2006 Mellies? Sure. Will I?

Well, you know Leaguers, there's a bit of work involved in all this. If I were going to do this, I'd like to know if anyone but RHPT and Jim D. were going to pop up with their responses.

So, that's your cue, team...

No comments: