Thanks for your suggestions, Patrick.
I agree somewhat with the 'Retired should be left as is' thing, but we need to agree on a way that current members can aim for the title too. This is why we believe it best to change Retired to applications on a quarterly basis. Not 100% sure on whether or not we will have a Retired Leader role yet. This is still in the works and frankly one of the least important parts of the changes for now. I think the current Retired members are cool to stay (even if they're inactive or not) and can be considered 'grandfathered' into the new 'scheme'. Meaning that they will not be getting demoted for inactivity. But new members from here on in, will need to adhere to the guidelines set out by the staff. (This includes demotion back to the previous rank for long periods of inactivity).
The new rank (lets just call it Private, because that's what everyone seems to be leaning towards) will most definitely have a leadership role to it and we are looking into promoting a leader to both the GFX section AND the new Contests section. These people will be recognised as sectional mods of their respective areas and shall be the ones to look after upcoming contests and material in each section. We want to promote these areas a bit more and believe doing this will help to achieve that. We will be looking into adding additional userbars soon for that too. (As well as the ability to hold more than one userbar at a time, this will be better defined soon enough).
I'm not sure if the current mods can even see the old Private forums/posts, but I shall look into this in due time.
Once again mate, thanks for taking time to give some sound advice. It's much appreciated.
Strat, we don't HAVE to belong to the contest team to run contests and such though, do we?