You can get random chatter in a discord or via pms or profile posts. The difference between forums and a chat site used to be some sort of structure and adherence to the discussion topics, it's also why spam rules exist to weed out such things. If somebody with no attachment to the site came across a thread discussing something they were interested in and found it to be littered with spam and people replying to that spam like a chatroom they're simply going to move on elsewhere. There are essentially spam threads on this forum as is for such things already, but people just treat the entirety (of the threads I've seen) as a spam thread from welcoming members so their first impression is spam to graphic threads, to the discussion and general threads even the forum games get derailed by spam, that's not charm that's lack of moderation.
This place is actually one of the larger sites of it's kind left, but that's more to the pitiable state of forums these days. I'd say first impressions are important though, but the welcome threads get greeted with "Do you believe in Tobidara" or however he writes it and people responding to him rather than actually speaking to the new member, hardly seems like a good impression to have welcome threads spammed and trolled especially when his manner of speaking is intentionally trolling and nobody really cares even Avani commented on it and pretty much just left it at that instead of doing anything about it.
As for a banner you're wanting some form of widget that'd require coding knowledge it's all fine and well, but does anybody on the forum actually know how to code well enough to create it? I've not seen anything like it on other Xenforo sites either so there might be inherent compatibility as well.
I don't think you need an anonymous form for contests/events you'd be interested in fact I'd say it'd be more helpful to leave it public to gauge interest of other members based on suggestions submitted. Mayhaps another member likes the idea but never thought of it themselves where a staff member might dismiss it assuming it might not have any other interested parties leaving it open to crowdsourcing so to speak could streamline somebody's idea into a workable solution or show general forum-wide interest.
The problem with running a contest is style differences as mentioned before if the emotes are disjointed then it can look a bit sloppy. If everybody kept them withing the vector style of things it wouldn't really be an issue and a vector style would look cleaner anyway and is already associated with anime.
Appearance matters sure, but not sure if I'd say graphics keep anything except a graphics forum alive though and they died out with the great discord pilgrimage like numerous others. Now only the specialized wide audience sites survive a couple of big name pokemon sites, a fire emblem one is still running, a few anime ones and video game sites mostly shut down in favor of Reddit, but company forums are still alive like The Coalition's, Ubisoft's, Epic's, but they're all terrible, graphics forums can't name one aside maybe Deviant Art, but that's general art so that doesn't really count and the forums attached to it are absolutely abysmal.
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Whipped this up in response to the Favicon
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It has a white outline so on a white background it looks a bit off from how it should, but it also is generally shrunk to 16x16 so making it'd be half the size most of the time.