Tap wrote: I have high hopes in the interest being revived as Dave and kwando are much better placed to interview members unlike Meph and I am. Member of the Month was built on community contributions, and we measured those contributions for a very long time through trial development in 'Your Trials', or art success in the 'Your Art' forums. I've said it before - I can count on one hand the amount of times I've talked to a number of active members -- DeeYo, Dave, kwando and so forth. Some members move in different circles on the forums. I rarely visit the Xat, and I haven't been in a Forum RP for a number of years, so a changeover is maybe what it needs...
I have always heard/been told it was never built/based through community contributions. If it was solely that, there would be members that have gotten MoTM that shouldn't have gotten it ever.
It would've been better if there were some actual guidelines in list format to know if you can qualify to even have a chance at MoTM. Who's going to be interested in something they believe they'll never probably have a chance to get into? There looked to be a bunch of members in that person of interest thread that I don't recall ever really posting much, if at all when these motm threads came out.
Either way, I don't trust any "unofficial" person to try to revive MoTM, especially so soon. I'm going to predict that it'll end up devolving into a popularity contest. Sure you want to get to know people better and it would be cool to give them recognition, but at least I could trust Tap, or at least was given the impression by him, that he could give EVERYBODY a shot at MoTM, and not simply for contributions, or even popularity/relevance for that matter. Narokh, who's an underrated author, and a guy that rarely gets attention and doesn't ask for much in return, finally got his shot of being MoTM after all these years since he was a quietly participating member of AAO, even if his "relevance" faded into obscurity (which just sounds like you're saying he lost popularity, which I doubt is true to begin with...even though you're saying it doesn't matter...).
I knew for a fact when Meph ran things, I personally would never have gotten MotM status, because he only tended to choose the "safe" people, the most popular people around (at the time). At least that's the impression I always got. I expect the same with this unofficial hosting, especially with this whole buddy-buddy culture going on here nowadays it seems like.
That's just all my opinion. I don't flat out reject reviving this unofficially, since it would be a nice change of pace to see what new blood can do to make the motm interesting again, I just think MoTM will become worse off now. I hope I can be proven wrong on this (assuming there isn't anyone that's going to try to "inflate" views/interest artificially now)