Monthly Task Brainstorming

[The Littlest Leaf Dragon]

While trying to figure out how to increase participation in the monthly tasks, a few things came to my attention.

1) Of the people who express interest in a task, only a small percentage actually complete the task.
2) A good few people have said that they weren't even aware of the monthly tasks.

This brings up the question of what our members think of the monthly tasks system.  Do you think that we should run the tasks longer than a month?  Is there anything that we should do to increase awareness of the tasks for new members who may not know about them?  Is there anything in general we could do to make the tasks more appealing?

Consider this an open thread to suggest and discuss anything that you might want to see happen with our monthly features.  I want to hear what you guys think so that I know how to improve them for you guys.

[pj]

They are already being mentioned twice each moth in the newsletters.

Perhaps paring down what it cycling through the news flasher and featuring them prominently there would help?  Likewise with the Meeting Place.

Featuring them on the front page might help too - a lot of people use that as a landing zone when coming in.

[StarSeeker]

They are already in the main pages (though a bit outdated).

[Serenity]

Hmm... well, I do try them, but I fail at incubating dreams / remembering goals. Hence why my lack of completion on them.

I LOVE, that you added getting a reward for completing a personal goal as the basic task, Wolve. 

I wonder if maybe we should do a voting system, like the Monthly meeting place? Sort of like... have people make suggestions, and then the top 3 from a vote get chosen (and level of difficulty matched to the task).

The other exposure I can think of is just... the chatroom It's been quite active lately, because of DnD, but we're not always RP-ing. When we're in public, it's a great time to bring up a challenge (and it's on-topic, yay!), and get the members curious enough to have a peek.

[The Littlest Leaf Dragon]

Good ideas.

[StarSeeker]

Oh yes, I confirm.
The chat is the best vehicle to give visibility to something.

[The Littlest Leaf Dragon]

What do you guys think of possibly replacing the monthly task with something similar but based in the goal journals?  Anyone who completes one of their goals (presumably in their goal journal, but they can just post in a thread with their dream or whatever) gets a badge for a month?  We already sort of do it anyway, and a lot of the awards awarded are from people completing their own goal and not from people completing one of the prescribed goals, so I figure why not just reward people for following their own path and completing their own goals?

[Serenity]

I like the idea, but perhaps we can, instead, invert the monthly challenge with a side note saying, "if you lack inspiration, look here" and link to the appropriate difficulty level of general dream tasks? like... cos we were doing a system of basic = 1 goal, intermediate = 2 and advanced = 3, right? (I haven't looked for a while, because I've been sleeping poorly and not dreaming well).

[Rebel Seven]

Consider me the test run!

I made a separate goal journal to really keep track and develop my methods for taking on my personal goals. Because I have so very many personal goals I don't take on the meeting place or monthly task goals so this was the best way I could think of to keep up inspiration, motivation, and analysis...and it works!

Keeping a special journal for my goal attempts lets me see trends in what works for me and what doesn't when it comes to dream methods both in and before the dream. It makes me accountable for actually planning out how I will attempt a goal, instead of just saying I want to do it.

I would definitely suggest this method for other people with specific goals they want to complete.

You can see how I organize it here: http://mortalmist.com/forum/index.php?topic=4647.0

[iadr]

I like the idea, but perhaps we can, instead, invert the monthly challenge with a side note saying, "if you lack inspiration, look here" and link to the appropriate difficulty level of general dream tasks? like... cos we were doing a system of basic = 1 goal, intermediate = 2 and advanced = 3, right? (I haven't looked for a while, because I've been sleeping poorly and not dreaming well).

That idea makes sense. Let each person select whatever task they want to complete from each level of difficulty from the dream task challenges, but provide a link to those challenges so that a person can find them. Then when a person completes one of their chosen challenges, they can post it in the appropriate section for that month and get a nice badge for their effort. This would make it a lot easier on Wolvendeer as he'd only need to keep track of who completed the challenges instead of trying to come up with 3 new challenges each month, and would help people get more into the other lucid challenges as they would be looking there to decide which challenge they want to work on.

[mentalenforcer]

How do we go about determining relative difficulty of tasks?

[The Littlest Leaf Dragon]

How do we go about determining relative difficulty of tasks?

That's a good question.  What's easy for one person may be difficult for another.  I think we if we continued categorizing tasks like that, we would have to just let each person determine how hard it was for them.