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I agree with this post by Pengu that expanding integration efforts to the NS side of the region will help us increase activity here.  I'm coming to yinz for help in fleshing this out.  I have a few ideas that I'd like to share.

1.  NS Forum Topic
A topic on the NS forums (you don't say!) for Wintreans to ask questions and have them answered.  We know every nation in the region has access to the NS forums, and the topic will be permanent, in that it's always available.  On the downside, we have no way of restricting it to Wintreath residents, so there's the potential for trolls, enemies, and jerks to crash the party.

2.  Weekly Q&A Sessions
Advertised on the WFE, RMB, here, there, elsewhere - a designated time and place for experienced members to interact with the not-so-experienced.  We can do this over IRC, the RMB, even telegrams ("The Mentors are ready to receive your telegrams for the weekly Q&A until midnight tomorrow!" - for example).  This is interactive - it gets potential citizens and residents talking to one of us immediately.  However, we have no way of knowing when the majority of our residents are online, and restricting the activity to a set time seems inefficient given the permanence of many forms of communication we have available here.

3.  Suggestion Box
Telegram your questions throughout the week to a puppet nation who will make a forum post (here and NS) or create a dispatch answering them weekly.  The post or dispatch will remain available until the next one is posted.  This allows for detailed, lengthy answers, and allows us to collaborate on more complex issues (requests for new features or activities, e.g.), but waiting a week for an answer to a simple question is not exactly efficient either.  Perhaps the puppet nation could take telegrams constantly, and the username and password would be shared between the Mentors and other volunteers?  That way simple questions could get relatively fast answers and more complex or interesting ones could be compiled into a weekly update.

This is about 15 minutes of brainstorming, so please be gentle.

I like these suggestions, and I think for the Forum one, Wintermoot's guide could include a link to the topic for those who may have questions.  I think the only deterrent for this is that they're debating visiting our forums.  It might come into question as to why they'd have to visit a NS messageboard Q&A topic to tell them why they should visit Wintreath.

However, a plus to this is that it could attract out-of-region people into wanting to check out the region and see what we're about, and possibly get some new players in.  The downside would be what you stated about possible trolls abusing/spamming the topic and defeating the purpose of having it.

A weekly Q&A sounds nice, and we could even extend it further and invite people to a special IRC channel, or even the main one, and encourage them to ask questions that they may have as we answer for them, and give them an idea of what our members are like in a more personal-esque setting.  Almost like a reverse-interview to where they're interviewing us before they decide whether or not they want to join the family.

I think the suggestion box idea is nice, but what about just have it be a post/announcement thingy by Wintermoot (I don't know what you call it) that our mentors and others that may be interested in taking part are open to answering questions, and listing the helping nations so that people can telegram them directly?

It'd essentially be them choosing to give themselves a mentor before even joining the forums.

So instead of having some sort of event or place, we passivley suggest, "hey, these people answer questions. Ask them questions!"

So instead of having some sort of event or place, we passivley suggest, "hey, these people answer questions. Ask them questions!"

It could be both as well.  For the times it isn't going on, they'd be encouraged to ask those nations questions that they may have, whether it be nations who came in while nothing was happening, or nations that had questions they couldn't think of before.

I would advise a word of caution on the NS topic. We used to have a NS embassy on gameplay forums, and I decided to shut it down because it wasn't beneficial to our FA program and became a target for people that didn't like the region. If you want to go ahead with it that's fine, but prepare to possibly have to deal with people like that.

Overall though, I think the suggestions are great and will help people that aren't on the forums a lot.

Given that we KNOW Wintreath still has enemies and people that aren't bashful about sharing their negative feelings about the region, the NS topic was definitely last on my list. Along with the reasons Pengu stated.