Cool Wall back open - Under new management

[Snikle]

I talked this over with GranTurNismo and Jordan, and I'm all set to become the new Cool Wall curator. Right now I'm still waiting for Jordan to transfer the two main threads to me so I can edit them accordingly, but I figure a separate post here would be more visible to start with now anyway. I was sad to see the declining voter turnouts over the last few months of polling, and I hope we can reverse that a bit. I think part of the problem at least was the irregular posting schedule. Once I start putting up polls they will be on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. I'm also thinking of leaving them open for two weeks rather than 10 days to see if that helps the turnout a bit more. I was toying with the idea of putting a status update up whenever I create a new CW thread, but I'm worried that might be seen as excessive, and I'm leaning more towards the idea of putting up a single status on Sundays saying what the next week's polls are going to be about. Any feedback on these ideas would be appreciated.

Nomination rules will still be the same as they were under GranTurNismo, you're allowed to have 2 cars on the queue at a time and you do not have to post all the specs and info about the car when you nominate it (although you still can if you want to). So go ahead and hit up the nomination thread, bolster that queue. @Volksauto , @All Your Base , @Neddo , @Murcie_LP640 , @mustafur , @ThrasherDBS , @Adamgp , I remember all you usually participated in the wall and gave interesting nominations, so see this as your call to action.

I'll put up the first poll next Monday, the 22nd. Before then I'll also update the results thread.

 

[GranTurNismo]

I think the status idea could actually help the turnout. Honestly, I never even thought of doing that when I was curator. Perhaps members who do not visit this area of the site would see the status updates and click on the thread. Putting the thread link in the status would be handy.

 

[ThrasherDBS]

I'm not sure about bringing this back. I guess it'd make sense every once in a while when new models come out, but I really feel like because we've been doing this off and on for over ten years, we'd wind up scraping the bottom of the barrel and nominating everyday passenger cars that will wind up in "meh" at best. I know I really struggled to come up with anything fresh and original, pretty much resorting to looking up old articles on obscure cars on Google, or going "hey what's that?" driving by car lots. I don't know how many more I can really come up with.

 

[Snikle]

@ThrasherDBS and @GranTurNismo
I'm personally not worried about ever running out of cars for the wall. Sure, most "obvious" choices have been done already, but I think a big part of the fun of the wall is ranking the more obscure cars out there. I like finding out about cars I haven't heard of before. And there are even some pretty obvious choices that have slipped through the cracks. I've got a list of nominations on my computer waiting for their turn, and none of these cars are super famous like Miuras or Supras or anything, but I've got things like BMW Z1, AC 3000ME, Autech Stelvio Zagato, etc. They're all cars that many people do know about, they've just never been polled. There's plenty of new and interesting cars that never got their chance at polling, like the Kia Stinger, Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio, De Tomaso P72, Ferrari Monza SP1/2, Lamborghini Sian, Koenigsegg Gemera, pretty much anything from Genesis, etc. Maybe the '80s, '90s, and '00s have dried up in terms of car choices, but there were so many different cars made throughout history that we could never conceivably run out of interesting things to choose from.

 

[Snikle]

Bumping this thread again because I want to emphasize the importance of commenting on the Cool Wall threads, and this is probably the best place to do it. Commenting on the threads when you vote, even if it's just a simple reply like "It's nice. Cool" or "What an ugly car, SU" are great because it improves the visibility of the thread. It puts the thread into the "New Posts" area of the main forum page, puts it visible at the top of the "Cars in General" forum, etc. The more viewers a thread gets, the more votes it gets. The voter counts have been steadily trending upwards, but sometimes a thread seems to "slip through the cracks" and just commenting your decision and a blurb on why you voted that way is immense help to preventing that from happening. Now I don't want to sound like a Cool Wall dictator or nothing, so do whatever you want in the threads, just know that commenting with your vote is helpful for everyone.

 

[Snikle]

From now on, I'm marking all threads with polls that are still open with an asterisk (*), so it's easier for everyone to see which threads are still open versus ones that have closed already, especially helpful if they only come to this subforum every so often. Especially helpful for when people bump threads where the poll has closed, so open threads are less likely to get lost under it.