If you already started one, then no. But any new individual/personal challenges should be placed in our FV blogs. If they're posted, they'll be moved to the blogs. The challenge forum posts that aren't stickied can be for weekly or monthly threads. Does that make sense? Like for years we had frugal challenge the week of or the month of:
It was still group but broken down for people that wanted to stay on track in smaller increments of time.
The forums have a major update slated in 2009. This should provide better integration of the social groups and the blogs. So they don't seem like the red headed stepchild of the forums. Excuse the term for those that are possibly offended.
I love the challenges and don't want to seem like I'm nitpicking, but I want everyone to understand that the big picture is 100's and potentially thousands of personal and individual challenges and how confusing that is for newcomers and well anyone. Not to mention, many people come here for frugality and that's one of the least active forums at the moment.
I've mentioned all of this before and always get the response that they get more views on the forums. Well if it's your (not you specifically but anyone) own personal accountability and it's all about you (for lack of a better way of saying it) then it's blogging and not a community forum post/thread. The blogs don't get the eyeballs that the forums do because everyone is blogging in the forum. Some without realizing it. Some that do.
To clarify, if you've ever been on other forums that don't have blogs, they have individual journals on the forums. That just gets out of control with literally hundreds of people having their own section. That's why there are blogs and social groups here. So you have a place that's individually "yours"
I'll also add, OK let's say one person starts a frugal challenge and says if you'd like to join me, you can. Then 10 others do the same in their own threads. There's 11 frugal challenge threads and the main frugal group challenge thread and while it's awesome we're all doing challenges, imagine how the person who has one person join their challenge feels when comparing themself to the person that has 50 people participating to theirs. Especially, if the person with only one person sharing started theirs first. Oy. Ahhh yes, these are the e-mails and pm's I receive. So please, to decrease animosity, let's try to get back to group challenges in the challenge forum. And then breaking them down into weeks and months if desired. And blogging in the blogs and creating groups if you ever want to run your own anything.
We'll keep existing personal accountability threads as they are. But in the future, how it's always been done is new challenges start each year. They're stickied and then they're often splintered off into weeks and months. If a challenge wasn't stickied and started in the new year, then new group challenges are posted in the forum and stickied later when requested.
Phew..hopefully I made sense. I know many won't agree but you'll have to understand things from an organizational point of view. Community collaboration and accessing information are part of my key objectives.
*edited to add* Hopefully everyone understands that it's not as if anyone has done anything wrong. It wasn't an issue when there were only a few. It's becoming an issue, so before it gets out of control, we'll organize it.
Or in a few months, if it doesn't seem to be working out and we'll try something else that might.
