So I was sitting around and thinking, comparing and contrasting this board to several others when I came up with an idea. With a little bit of lurking, I found out that the 2-star rank is essentially useless and void now-a-days so I was wondering how we could make it not useless and so my idea was contests and specifically a reward for 1st place in said contests. (So the suggestion is to change what the 2-star rank represents altogether).
I considered all points, positive and negative, and how contests (and the 2-star rank) would work on this board so I'll go over it all. Well for one thing, I noticed a mod say that "you should watch the members with stars" since they're respectable (I think robby said that) and from my experience in forum contests, I realized that sometimes you'll get a really shitty crop and 1st place goes to the person that sucked the least out of a pool of suck. To prevent having a crappy 1st place repping the 2-star rank you could easily rectify this problem by having a "point cutoff", that is to say if you make a certain amount of points (i.e. 70 out of 100) then and only then could you qualify for 1st place.
You'd also have to beat everyone else so I think the "point cutoff" system would do wonders with the legitamacy of gaining the rank. Then there's the matter of participation and sheer amount of people with the rank so my suggestion for that would be to have the contests take place only during the period of time that the character tournament is NOT taking place and only give the rank to 1st. Since no one will be participating in character tournaments, the contests will definitely have a large crowd of people and something to do during the in-between time. Also, I'm positive that people will participate given the organization and participation in the character tournament.
For the matter of judges, once a person has earned the 2-star rank I think it would be safe to say that that person qualifies to judge in future contests so that would solve that problem. For material, there's plenty: writing, drawing, photography, videos, music, debates, etc.
The only problem I see is whether or not Arlong Park is the kind of board that is down with the whole contest scene and the willingness of mods to make this happen. The 2-star rank is merely a suggestion for incentive and to make it less useless but I wouldn't mind if the prizes are changed to something else (such as pooling prizes like back in the JuJu vs TLC debate).