I have written up a rather long post that will be broken into two or three parts. The first part is below. The other part(s) will be posted at a later date. This is open discussion pertaining to the Haiku Contest and Poetry Contest. The Art Skills Competition may also weigh in where relevant.
Let's get the innocuous out off the way. The following are hopefully uncontroversial proposed changes that should be easy to implement.
[HAIKU][POETRY] Retire the kilopost threads. Start a new thread each year with up-to-date rules and keep the content fresher. This means the threads will be done at the end of this year and a new thread will take its place. This deals with the problem of outdated rules and permanent rule changes in the middle of the thread. [HAIKU] Create a new account to store winning entries to the Haiku Competition. [POETRY] Reopen _Poetry_ or create new account to store winning entries of the Poetry Competition. I'm leaning toward opening a new account, because _Poetry_ is affected by the underscore glitch.
Re: Winner Account 1.) You guys are way overestimating the usage of accounts that do not post, comment, or otherwise interact with the community. It's easy to deal with. No account is as bad as the game comments unless that account is also responding. It's not an admin's account and it's not a popular game dev's account. Mod accounts don't even get that many comments.
2.) You can't get a merit if it's not a comment.
3.) _Poetry_ worked.
Re: New Thread 1.) It's not important right now who creates the thread if we can't get consensus for a new one or conditional consensus. It's going to be whoever created the original thread, or in the absence of creator, the current judge.
2.) For Poetry Contest, it's more outdated information than rules. It's not a theme of the week anymore. No one's used _Poetry_ since DragonMistress was judge. And there isn't a way to edit posts. So are people for opening a new account or reopening _Poetry_, which can be affected by the underscore glitch, which may be an acceptable risk?
Re: Merits 1.) To be discussed after the next part.