The First Annual Mane Land Community Awards

We don’t look at The Mane Land as a “website,” but rather as a community. While I’ll cop to not having as much time as I’d like to help grow the community, the goal is still to make this an active, fun place to exchange ideas on the club we support. To that end, we present our first annual TML Community Awards below. But before I get to those, here is some background on how contributions to this site are made.

SB Nation’s setup makes its member sites accessible to both site staff and readers. In addition to leaving comments under stories, anyone who “joins” the site can publish a FanPost or a FanShot, right from the main page. We encourage FanPosts as an alternative to writing a really long comment. If you’ve got a lot to say about a subject, please consider making a FanPost about it. Many of our staff writers over the last two years started out by writing FanPosts, so…you never, know – we might just try to recruit you.

FanShots are the perfect place to share cool photos, videos, story links, social media posts and the like. We have a lot of eyes, but we don’t see everything, so feel free to share cool things with our community via a FanShot.

So, in the spirit of sharing and community building, I thought it might be a good idea to start letting everyone know who our most prolific community members are in terms of contributions. While this isn’t necessarily an indication of quality – although I find most of the folks mentioned below to contribute in a positive way to the discussion (even when the topic calls for negativity) – but rather quantity.

Here are The Mane Land Community Awards for the 2016 calendar year (names in bold are current staff members):

Most FanPosts

• hondacrv1212* – 12       
• Jeremy Croston** – 5        
• jay1212* – 4        
• Gavin Ewbank – 3        
• Vamosocity – 3        
• Nperelmuter – 3        

*Both screen names represent the same person. An account issue forced him to create a new account.

**Hired on as a staff writer in 2016 but has since moved on.

Most FanShots

• Gavin Ewbank – 15       
• Austin David – 4        
• Michael Citro – 3        

Most Comments

• dcluley – 539      
• Manchu80 – 392      
• JackMcAwesome – 332      
• Zontar – 313      
• Michael Citro – 309      
• LionBull – 278      
• DSMilne – 246      
• WhosYourData? – 183      
• Deroa – 154      
• jay1212 – 138      

What do these numbers tell me? The first thing that jumps out is that not enough writers are engaging in the comments sections of their stories (or anyone else’s, for that matter). It also reveals that for the most part, readers have not warmed up yet to FanShots and most haven’t been keen to try FanPosts, either. While jay1212 (formerly hondacrv1212) has found a creative outlet in FanPosts, the majority of those posts have been from those auditioning for a position on the writing staff. These numbers also show that Gavin is a FanShot machine, averaging more than one per month.

I’d love to see more comments from our staff writers and more FanPosts/FanShots from our readers. Some of you have made some well-thought-out and interesting posts in our comments area and those would have made for some great FanPosts. If a FanPost is well done, I’m certainly willing to add it to the site’s “regular” layout so that it stands out and more people can enjoy it.

As we’ve said from Day 1, this is your site too. I will encourage staff to engage in the comments section but I leave the readers’ involvement in this community up to their individual comfort level. I also want to be more accessible to all of our community members, so feel free to DM my @ManeLandMichael Twitter account or send us an email at TheManeLand@gmail.com if you would like to run an idea past me that you’re not sure about and on which you’d like some feedback.

As always, thanks for reading and being a part of this community, whether passively or actively.