Suggestions and ideas

[Homer Potvin]

I like the idea, but there aren't going to be dogs on the menu. And we have to be very careful about what we feature. You can only really focus on 2-3 things at a time. And whatever those are HAVE to work so the forum projects energy and enthusiasm. The last thing I want is dead areas and empty threads and a bunch of wasted effort for something nobody wants. I'm not saying this would fall into that category at all, but we would need to be like 78.3% certain it would be popular before we put an ounce of effort into it.

Y'all are going to hear me say this a lot: we are going to have a lot more information over the next few months. I'm going to be laser focused on membership levels and participation, particularly in the Workshop, Contest, and Roleplay areas. Those are things that can and should be featured through all means necessary. We will be able to create social media platforms and explore other areas of "advertisement." Whether that's to recruit new members (guest attraction) or keep our current members engaged (guest retention) remains to be seen. You need to do both, but there are different strategies involved depending on what you need more.

 

[big soft moose]

there wasnt a huge amount of enthusiasm for our own nano when we floated it on the old site... it could theoreectically be a means of attracting a bunch of new members, but i doubt it...to be honest i doubt nano is really dead, i suspect they'll either resurect themselves or someone will take overthe brand

 

[Naomasa298]

there wasnt a huge amount of enthusiasm for our own nano when we floated it on the old site... it could theoreectically be a means of attracting a bunch of new members, but i doubt it...to be honest i doubt nano is really dead, i suspect they'll either resurect themselves or someone will take overthe brand

Maybe they'll do it without all that AI bullshit.

 

[Luxuria]

Maybe they'll do it without all that AI bullshit.

You're right. That's my worry. But yeah, I agree with working on our current goals first. I think the reason I why I brought this up again, is because I am not a short story writer. My main form of writing is that of novels, so I suppose I wanted a section/recognition for novel-writers like myself in some way. But yes, I do agree with all of you. We need to remain small in our goals so we can grow.

 

[big soft moose]

well a large part of our workshop is novels , and a large part of peoples progress journals will be novels. That's not to say we couldn't run the occasional competition for a first chapter or a blurb or whatever... but the main point is we can't do everything at once or run before we can walk

phase one was to get everyone to the new site - we're well on our way with that

phase two was to build out the site properly with stuff like contests and so on and get people creating content... especially in the target areas homie mentions above

phase three will be everything else in a prioritized and stuctured way, so we do value the ideas we're just not ready to implement them yet

 

[Naomasa298]

Do we have a current concept on how the workshop will evolve? I assume it won't stay as One Big List©.

 

[big soft moose]

Do we have a current concept on how the workshop will evolve? I assume it won't stay as One Big List©.

No the plan is to split it up by genre when we have enough content to be worth splitting up. I’ll get some genre prefixes sorted asap so people can flag their work appropriately which will make the eventual split easy

 

[Homer Potvin]

And, Moose, can we slap something on the banner, too? Anything that says something other than Xenforo, even if it's crayon? I have no idea how to do that.

 

[big soft moose]

I’ll see what I can do

 

[ps102]

Speaking of contests, is there a rough estimate of when they'll be up and running again? Will it be a months-long ordeal?

 

[big soft moose]

no detail yet - the sticking point is pretty much the anonymiser... the plug in we used at the OG site doesnt exist for XF2 and things like 'post anonymously' which do doesn't do exactly what we want.

there are ways round it, like taking submissions by DM but that's a bit half arsed

the other option is not to worry about being anonymous since we are now fairly clique free

end of the day once we've got the lifeboats docked and the passengers settled, competitions are the next priority

 

[Set2Stun]

Over on .com concerns regarding bias have come up, so I tend to post my contest entries anonymously these days over there. It's not really a hassle for the showrunner from what I've observed, and those contests get quite a lot of entrants. I think the lowest I've seen was 8 entries, and the highest 19. Entrants simply DM their story to the showrunner and they post it for ya. Probably takes two minutes a story, if that.

The way the winner is determined I feel is going to depend on the number of entries we receive. The average user is absolutely not going to read 19 stories and then pick their top 3. So, each of those contests is scored by a panel of (typically) 3 volunteer judges.

That contest is still feasible as the word limit is 650. It's still a commitment to judge, but I think we can figure out a good way to run the flash contests here. All depends on the participation level. The short story contests, I'm not so sure of. Higher participation would be kind of a bad thing if the word count isn't kept fairly low, say no more than 2500.

 

[Iain Aschendale]

the other option is not to worry about being anonymous since we are now fairly clique free

Clique-free or not I prefer anonymity; it allows me to focus on nothing but the writing. When I grade essays at work there's an anonymizer function which I use. I think it's just better not to have anything else in your mind when you're evaluating. My 2yen.

 

[Naomasa298]

The way the winner is determined I feel is going to depend on the number of entries we receive. The average user is absolutely not going to read 19 stories and then pick their top 3. So, each of those contests is scored by a panel of (typically) 3 volunteer judges.

I don't know how they choose their judges, but given they once had a guy judging who was basically a workshop troll, I'm not sure if I support that system. But I reckon, if it's user judges, it's even more important that the entries are anonymous. Not that I don't trust users, but biases, whether active or unconscious, do affect results.

 

[Set2Stun]

I don't know how they choose their judges, but given they once had a guy judging who was basically a workshop troll, I'm not sure if I support that system. But I reckon, if it's user judges, it's even more important that the entries are anonymous. Not that I don't trust users, but biases, whether active or unconscious, do affect results.

Judging is done on a volunteer basis. Almost always, the persons volunteering are active, visible members that everyone knows, though technically it's open to anyone who wants to do it. In the two years that I've been participating, there was only one incident where a newish member gave out troll scores. It was the annual all-star competition too, and this chud gave more than half of the stories 10/20 or less.

Weird things like that can happen on occasion, and then we just have to trust the admins to find an acceptable solution. In this case, they voided the troll's scores.

 

[Naomasa298]

Judging is done on a volunteer basis. Almost always, the persons volunteering are active, visible members that everyone knows, though technically it's open to anyone who wants to do it. In the two years that I've been participating, there was only one incident where a newish member gave out troll scores. It was the annual all-star competition too, and this chud gave more than half of the stories 10/20 or less.

Weird things like that can happen on occasion, and then we just have to trust the admins to find an acceptable solution. In this case, they voided the troll's scores.

I wonder if you and I are thinking of the same person.

Well, let's see how it goes.

What would be awesome is if say, once a year, we could get a successful author to be a guest/celebrity judge.

 

[ps102]

I kind of like the panel of judges system .com has. It might be a great idea to come up with a similar system for flash.

.com also has rewards for active judges. For example, they get to participate in the yearly paid contest, and they also get a nice little medal in their profile.

And I agree that the PM system for anonymizing stories is simple enough. Sure, it's not great, but we can go with that for now until the staff figure out something better. We shouldn't let that stall the contest.

 

[Naomasa298]

One thing we used to do way back when was allow people to discuss stories and give feedback after the voting was over. We stopped it because some authors didn't want feedback. I think we should bring that back - it's more of an incentive for people to get involved. But if an entrant doesn't want it, they should be allowed to specify that when they post their entry.

 

[Set2Stun]

Yeah the feedback is nice. When I judge, I'll provide a few paragraphs about what I thought worked and what didn't. And I'm appreciative of judges' feedback on my own entries. I find it odd that anyone would want to put their work out there and not want feedback, but I agree that this could be optional. Maybe some users weren't following the Golden Rule of "don't be a dick."

 

[big soft moose]

i don't think we're planning on judges tbh - forum voting has always worked fine before