Naruto Discussion Forum - Viz Labs - The Project/Game Initiative

tldr; - I'm going to be making the helping out and contributing to the site into a more organized game that people get rewarded for, to let you guys have easy access to know what we're working on, and to generally help speed up and improve development of the site.

There are many people helping out and contributing their time and effort to various things on the site, and I feel bad for not rewarding them more. At the same time, because doing the big projects they create and take on themselves can be a daunting task, many times things get lost in the process, and they tend to either take up more of the time these generous users have been gracious enough to give to it, as well as drag their own efforts down. It can be fun to do all of this kind of thing, but the disorganization, miscommunication and general effort it takes to manage it tends to drag that down into the mud.

As such, we're going to be a bit more organized with things, and turn it all into a game that many people can jump into and play, letting them each collaborate and contribute in a way that keeps the site fresh, new, fun, and most importantly, legitimately rewarding.

Though the specifics are still being worked out, the gist of what I want to do is this -

I'm going to make a new Viz Labs category forum. Within that, the organization is going to look something along the lines of this -
(It may seem long, but it's the same thing over and over, as a visual reference of the forum/subforum layout and distinctions)

Spoiler:

Within that, here's how it'd work -

People would be more or less designated as 'in charge' of different areas. Like say Blog Posts / Newsletters. Those people are the ones that have access to move the threads and edit the OPs.

Where a thread is designates it's status as an activity. If it's In Progress, that's what's being worked on that you can contribute to. As those get done, you move in more of the ones from the Next category to begin working on. If it's On Hold, then we're committed to doing it, just not now (maybe it's something we've decided to do come Christmas, maybe it's something that would happen if a new Naruto Movie came out, maybe it's something we simply can't do until something ELSE is done first, etc, but for whatever reason, we're not going to be working on it right now at this present moment) - no action is taken on it at the time. If it's a Maybe, you can have it there for coming back to periodically to think on, and maybe even popping in your opinion on it, but it's also not being worked on right now. Don't Do is for the things it's been decided we're not going to devote any time or resources to working on, because right now, we're working on other things (or maybe these things are just things we never want to do ever, like make the forum mascot a pink flamingo). Completed is where everything that gets done in the In Progress area is moved once it's all finished.

Any new ideas, suggestions or anything like that are made as a new thread in the Inbox area for every major area. One idea per thread. Even if it seems redundant, or like it's been addressed before. Once the new thread is made, it's reviewed, compared to what we're working on right now, and we decide whether we can start working on it right now and begin planning what to do, whether we want to think about it later as a Maybe, etc.

If something is to be worked on, the thread is moved to it's appropriate area. The OP is edited to include every single thing that needs to be done / worked on to complete the thing. People can post in that thread saying they want to do this, or that, and a person in charge then updates the OP to show who all is working on what thing.

As this stuff gets churned along, based on how many items you tackle, projects you're involved in that get completed, and things of that nature, you get awards, achievements, custom titles, access to certain things, extra features and privileges on the site, name changes, etc. You essentially earn points for helping out, and they're all automatically tallied by the system, along with you getting visual badges, medals, etc, in your profile, the area under your avatar, and your signature.

All of this would also let anybody look in and see what's being worked on right now, and how they could help. I get people asking me that all the time, and it'd streamline all of that, along with rewarding anyone that legitimately helped get something done.

I'm writing all of this from a project manager and game designer's point of view, but I'm putting this all out there to you to ask if any of it makes sense, and what you guys think about it.

Thoughts?