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====4. How do you keep your community alive and active?====

ROM hacking and modification is the best way, although we can no longer do it. So, we have year-round, 3-month long contests and events, sometimes with prizes. They include a fan art contest, fan fiction contest, remix contest, and "Dream Splash", which is a site-wide event encouraging people to submit anything—art, fiction, or remixes—around a central theme, like a certain character or place.

We also seek interviews with developers and translation of Japanese materials, like interviews or guidebooks that didn't come out in the US. For whatever reason, we've had a difficult time finding help in translating things. It was really unfortunate, as there have been a lot of interviews and features on the Chrono games to come out of Japan that were never translated to English. If you check out the Chrono Trigger article on Wikipedia, you'll see it has a massive section on its development. That entire section is rather recent, and only exists because we finally got help from GlitterBerri and some others in translating interviews about Chrono Trigger that came out fifteen years ago. There's a lot of stuff yet to be translated, including numerous developer interviews about the games. Since these interviews often contain really interesting (and sometimes earth-shattering) information, their translation and release keep the community going.

A third way we've kept it going is through a quality General Discussion forum. The Chrono Compendium was started by several bright people, and that created a forum culture that's survived through the years. Our moderation was always very hands-off; we let disputes resolve themselves, rather than locking everything or encouraging drama. This mature environment led to a solid community of friends, which spawned a lot of enriching discussion and links among members. It's hard to create an atmosphere like that with very steady hands and cool heads, but it can be done. Some of the greater ROM hacking community's biggest problems have come from the volume of drama and discord it seems to generate, with translation hacker elitists and pet project promoters stirring things up. I'm glad that was never a part of Kajar Laboratories.

Lastly, the Compendium's excellent site and infrastructure keep the community going. There is no page on the Chrono Compendium that's unfinished. Everything in the series has its own encyclopedia entry, whether character, location, magic tech, or weapon. If someone wants complete, authoritative information on something or is looking for good discussion, the Compendium as it exists right now demonstrates that they'll get it. Anyone can do this, too! They just need some hard work and determination. If some links on a community fan site are 404s, or certain information hasn't been added yet, the entire community is metaphorically resting on an incomplete foundation. Pour some serious effort into making a perfect repository of information about the dead franchise, and it'll pay off. A great Community About page also helps by outlining the community's current goals, structure, and history (like http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Chrono_Compendium:About.html). Don't be afraid to get meta, but organize meta-information about the community well.