Zantherus

Ziveeman and I spent several hours designing the new front page of Zantherus. It actually required more effort than I initially thought since I had to edit the template heavily to get exactly what I wanted. The final result looks really nice, I think. I like it a lot.

It’s Wordpress, if you haven’t been able to tell, just like this blog. I had to remove all instances that really made it look like a blog, like the categories, and the dates on the static content (that was a bitch to remove). But I like the minimalist theme (thanks to the creator of DarkZen), it looks great.

Ziveeman and I will be holding a contest for the members to be able to write the intro page for anyone that views the page. Of course, we will have to note that the page was written by a member and doesn’t reflect the views of the administration just in case the intro page is… racy.

Also, there’s the ad on the page now. It came with the theme, and we might as well use it. All we ask for the ad are one of two things:

• A small donation (the length of the ad will depend on the donation)
• Posting on the community (length of the ad will depend on the length of activity)

Hopefully people will start to use it.

Zantherus

We’re ending the first year of the Zantherus Presidents. Having gone through a total of 5 different terms, they all had one thing in common: inactivity.

Every term we have presidents promising certain things - more contests, a website, etc - but what do we end up getting instead? Nothing. In fact, the President normally isn’t even there to give us nothing.

Let’s take a look at the current President - KittehKat. She hasn’t even logged on since November 28th (at the time of the writing). While we do understand that sometimes life gets in the way, is there no obligation to, at the very least, notify the members and apologize publicly? Every time a President is elected - and during the election, the President is quite active - the President somehow manages not to log on during their term. This has happened five times in a row. Is that really what a President is supposed to do?

While I admit that partial fault comes from the sole fact that the President isn’t explicitly told by us, the administators, what can be done and cannot be done, it makes me wonder if the President has the motivation to ask what can be done. Ask, and you shall receive. Hopefully the next President will be more proactive, rather than reactive. We’ve remedied this problem by creating a list of what they can do, so I hope that this will do the trick. We’ll be working a lot more with the President than we have in the past, and we’ll probably give them a BIG role for their term.

But, I have to admit, this election is looking out a lot better than usual. Of course, every election looks better than the last (did anyone not like the heated tension between Chibinity and KittehKat?). Maximum-Can has been non-stop active since he started to post around the end of summer and BassNazi has been actively contributing to the community for awhile now, hopefully neither of them will stop. The Advanced Placement classes are around the corner, which I suspect will hinder their activity by a little, but hopefully not by much.

That being said, I think that both Maximum-Can and BassNazi are really good candidates for President and I wish them the best of luck. I will suggest  that when the time comes to picking the Vice President, that the winner should consider picking the other, as a balance is always good, not to mention that they are certainly both qualified, in my opinion, to lead Zantherus to an era of greatness.

-Ziveeman

Zantherus

Yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a blog. Anyway just wanted to post what Ziveeman and I have been doing at Zantherus.

Well, to be frank, it hasn’t been too much but it is enough to take away precious posting time on Zantherus, so I hope the members will do their job and post more

Right now we’ve been focusing on advertising. Our Alexa rank (according to my browser) is #4,162,732. Which, I hope you can tell, is not good. Of course it’s better than being “unranked”… wait, I don’t even know if that’s possible. So basically, our Alexa ranking sucks. We’re trying to improve it. Which brings us to our next point:

Ads.

No, not ads OF Zantherus. Ads ON Zantherus.

Yes you heard me.

Don’t worry, we won’t be putting pop-ups or those annoying hover ads that you see on some other forums or sites. It’ll be simple text ads, so they won’t be too annoying. Ziveeman and I have been running Zantherus out of our pockets since it started so I hope everyone understands our choice. But, ads won’t be appearing on Zantherus for awhile because we need to increase our PageRank and Alexa ranking… advertisers won’t want to advertise on our site if we have a Alexa rank of four million.

We’re planning to make the ads only viewable to at least regular members and guests. I’m debating whether Silver members should be able to view it (probably not), but Gold Members, Senior Members, and Moderators will NOT view them fo’ sho’.

For the info, we just purchased an ad on the game ForumWarz. So if you want to check it out, register for the game and play it. Also, let me know so I can invite you to the Zantherus klan. It’s a really fun game and I’ve been only playing it for about a week. As of right now the ad hasn’t been approved but I’m sure it will be soon.

Anyway look out for more posts on the status of this ad campaign as well as other things behind the scenes on Zantherus.

Update: Our ad on ForumWarz was surprisingly enough, already approved. We’ve already gotten 101 impressions on the site. No click-throughs yet, but hey, it’s only been approved for like twenty minutes.

Zantherus