Ian Snyder wrote:If I may ask everyone at large, is there a particular reason for the lesser participation? Is it a natural consequence of this site's age, or does it arise from some element of the site we can improve? Was it just a bad theme?
I think having a 1 month gap between 2 pageants is just too much of a time, since the pageants are pretty much what make the site active. I think a lot of people actually stop coming back because of that, since there isn't enough material to keep the site active in these slow month. About pageants length, I agree with the suggestion that it should be shorter. in my case, I started up some experiments on some of the proposed theme before forgetting about it since I didn't got a deadline coming up soon.
Other thing I like to see is judging, like the java4k competition. I think it's really helpful to have at least some kind of formal feedback from the same pool of people, that would go through all the entries and give some constructive criticism. That would require some commitment from the judge, so that's not something easy to have, but that would engage newbie in actually coming back in the next pageants to improve.