A problem that some squad leaders have brought up over the years is in keeping squad members active.  Under the new chit system, squad members who reach zero chits become deactivated and it looks bad on your squads roster on your squad page.

I will share some strategies and later post this into an article, but some discussion first will help it become a better article.

On field and off field

There are two ways that you want your squad to be active.  On the field as well as here on CSPO.

The benefits of having them active at the field are obvious.  How can they contribute to your squad in the game without playing the game?  However as paintball at almost any level is recreational and can cost a lot of money so a balance needs to be acheived between attendance and committment and flexibility to tackle the normal every day aspects of life.

The benefits of having them on CSPO are not as obvious but there are significant upsided to having everyone on the same communications platform that can yield great results.

The chit system - why?

Any squad leader with a growing and active squad can only really keep track of so many modes of communication at once.  The chit system on cspo allows you, the squad leader, to get a finger on the pulse of everyone in your squad in one place.  The only way that this will help you keep your eye on the ball is if your squad mates are using thid unified communication system at once.  You can track how manu recruits your 2IC has attempted to recruit and also how many of those recruits jabe even bothed to check out CSPO and register an account, for example.  Or you can see who has chimed in to attend a particular game, then compare that commitment to who actuallu showed.

The pm system allows for great private and group communication, squad pages tell infprmation about your squad's practice schedule and upcoming big games.  The sms system allows every update to your squad page to be texted to everyones phone.

Sure, there are other ways to communicate to your squad - text messages, phone calls, favebook, twitter, heck even the postal service.  CSPO allows you to update all of those mediums in one shot.  Every post to a squad's page automayically updates all of these mediums (well, except for the postal service).

The reason this is relevant is because chances are extraordinarily high that every person on your squad is using one communications medium other than phone calls and snail mail already.  Keeping your squad active online is as simple as making it convenient and relevant to log in.

Some strategies:

Keeping official squad business either in pms for private, or on the squad page.  Every pm sends an email to the recipient.  Every update to the squad page can text all of them at once. If they use twitter they can follow your squad and facebook will autoupdate.  Everything is sent with a link.

Ask for your squad to give input on a group oriented question in the forums.  Email tend to get lost in the shuffle and everyone meeting up in person can be hard to arrange and it is easy to lose focus on the topic at hand in larger groups.

Post player game logs.  This little used feature of cspo allows you to track your kills, deaths, what gun you used and what happened that day.  Everyone loves to rant about their battle glories, why not attach it to your profile.

All of these activities award chits.  Most types of new content added net 50 chits that last aboutnsix months.  Logging in awards a chit that lasts for a week.  Sending or getting a pm awards a chit that ladts a monh, most content, both your own as well as others can be shared to your social network which will also award you 25 chits.  Writing a comment nets you 5 chits, habing someone reply to yours nets you another chit.

Im order to not be deactivated, here are some things that keeps an account active:

Logging on once a week

Making a one player log entry every 5 months

Sending or receiving one pm every three weeks

Sharing something on cspo to facebook or twitter every 3 months

Commenting on something every 2 months

As you can see, it is not very diffifult to keep an account active.  Of course, more is always better, these are absolute minimums.  The system also emails you when youve dropped a rank or necome inactive, so if you forget it reminds you.

However this should be very much less about urging your squad to be active on the site and much more about giving them a reason to come her, and that is best done by using the site as a tool for communication.  If you post relevant information and multimedia thqt your squad wants and meeds to know, then they will come to the site enough t have no need to worry about adhereing to some sort of schedule.