I usually try to take a few weeks preparing a website before its launch. How much time do you spend preparing your websites?

As most of you already know, a lot has been changing for the better recently here at Makestation. It is hard to believe that just 1 1/2 months ago, we were still running SMF. Needless to say, a lot has happened very quickly here at Makestation, and with the 5,000 post milestone rapidly nearing, we have a lot to celebrate as a community.

Anyway, I had a few ideas, and wanted to get some feedback from the community on these ideas.

1) "Ancients vs. Moderns" competitions.
The whole idea hasn't really been clarified, but basically, the idea would be to have specific and themed competitions regularly between two teams here at Makestation, and we would come up with new themes for the competitions a few times a year. (Yes, I know that all of these competitions have been a bit confusing lately. If this goes forward, a significant effort would be made to make all of this much simpler. )

We would need some people to not only help come up with the theme for such competitions, but we'd need some team leaders as well. If any of you guys come up with any good ideas, feel free to post them here! If the idea goes forward, you might end up with the honor of being a team leader.

2) Ideas for what to use points on?
Something that we are planning to implement very soon is to create a "marketplace" board where users can provide services individually in exchange for points. For example, someone could start a theme desk where themes are created in exchange for MS cash. People could create threads in the marketplace to offer graphics designs, forum reviews, etc... so there are a certainly a lot of possibilities for this.

Any feedback on these ideas?

I have been listening to a lot of Three Days Grace lately. They are a great rock band that writes a lot of music that their audience can identify well with.

Any other fans of Three Days Grace?

Windows XP was undoubtedly one of the classics as far as windows releases are concerned. It looked much more appealing visually than its predecessors, while still not requiring a large amount of PC resources. It also had the libraries and DLLs needed to run most modern programs, unlike predecessors such as Windows 98.

However, it has been around for many years, and extended support ends this upcoming April in 2014. Many companies are now upgrading their PCs to prepare for the end of official support. What are your thoughts?

Makestation is a creative arts forum, as most of you guys know. Do you have a forum? If so, what is its genre?

I'm thinking about switching from Fedora to Linux Mint. Fedora is nice, but there are some things I don't really like about it as well.

Is Linux Mint any good? Should I give it a try?

If you've looked closely, you've probably noticed that in your edit profile page, you have the option to select a team as either "the ancients" or "the moderns." So far nothing has really been doing with this, but I thought about perhaps bringing in a couple of team leaders and doing some original competitions between two teams of some sort.

Also, would you guys be interested in a community activities board here for collaborative projects and things of that sort?

What are your ideas?

I found this, which was my first official, legitimate recording I ever did, and it is years old. It is far from perfect (I was still new to playing music at the time), but it was definitely an interesting find when I found the recording in one of my backups.

https://soundcloud.com/darth-apple/random

Forgive the bad mix, I was a noob when it came to music at the time.

And let the generic questions from Blake and Aco begin!

The Democratic Forum (Formally Just 'Aconia') is a forum that runs exactly like a modern democracy. There will be a legislature, voting, ranks like 'President' and 'Governor', among other things. If you want to see the in-dev version, visit here: http://aconia.icyboards.net/

NOTE: Before you start yelling, 'WHAT'S THE POINT LOL????' remember, this is only a fun experiment. Rest assured, if this goes well enough, it'll probably go on for a while