There is no promotion for this forum or the competitions. This site is ad free and fully funded out of my own pocket for us old farts and new coders who like to hang out and have a bit of fun. The site was only relaunched over a year ago and although we're small we have a great dedicated talent onboard which is brilliant I think. Hopefully over time the site will gain more members willing to post and join in.
I have thought about paying for adverts to raise awareness of this site but I don't know what kind of people it would bring in?. Personally I don't want a huge members number with loads of crappy posts. I kinda like the smaller niche forums where we all know each other and slowly build up. I'm in this for the long haul as coding has been my hobby for the last 35 years ( VIC 20 for my 10th Birthday started all this ) so I'm in no hurry to build up the numbers. Hopefully in time new members will trickle in and become part of this community.
We have a whole bunch of members willing to dedicate their time to post and boost this forum and its those type of members I'd like to see continue being part of this forum and help it grow. It's all about the sites members and it's them alone that make a community, not me, so here's my opportunity to say thanks to those that contribute to the forum.
In my opinion, this forum is quite perfect and very nice. Really very good. A lot of skilful game developers interact with one another via posts and replies. Programming learners can also learn a lot of knowledge here. I notice that the total number of members is always increasing.
Wow, 35 years of programming experience.
If I have time, I will also introduce this forum to other people...Sure!!
Pay attention when watching Andrew Price's newer videos. In the past he did very nice tutorials, newer ones were mostly hmm ... using his "pay"-stuff (materials you have to pay/register/... for - or have to look for quality stuff somewhere else with the result being not able to be absolutely sure if you did it correct as the visual result will differ).Next to Blender Guru there is also CGGeek - who does nice stuff, for short tips I prefer Jayanam-videos (think he is German like me - so excuse his maybe "simple" English) as they are concise. Blendernation.com links to many nice tutorial videos.And most useful thing is: to just start working with Blender for many things. If you do not need absolute precision you can even handle simple CAD stuff there (just am on my way to model a children's pumpkin-lantern with thread/nut and screw-ability of the LED light ... adjustments are done way easier then to fight with the pumpkin-modelling/sculpting in Solidworks ;-)).Every little thing you do there helps to get "used to" Blender - and to improve your model-skills or at least model-speed.Please also pay attention to the upcoming 2.8 release of Blender - it changes the interface (some newer tutorials use it already). I think it would be a good idea to try out the "alphas" to not get overrun by the interface changes then. I am still with 2.79.
Promotion could be done in other coding forums:- create a thread about the coding competition- post "votes now open" in this thread- if there was no reply in this thread: post about results there too- if there were many replies - new thread (for the structure ;-) - and awareness increasing)Benefit is, that you will reach the desired target audience.Disadvantage: smaller communities might not like the idea of getting users "stolen" (which is not the case) and in bigger communities there might be certain rules to follow - or there are too many people advertising in some ways.Still: every promotion has a little chance to attract a new coder.byeRon