Love Your Writers (those that can be saved) Anonymous 2010/07/20 (Tue) 22:56 No. 746 ID: ▼ Now that we're metaphorically yelled ourselves hoarse debating what exactly the problems (if any)the boards face are, let's turn our attention and apparent overabundance of free time to possible solutions. This thread is going here in /words/ in an attempt to steer discussion and possible overflow away from our conventional boards.
There is truth in much of what
>>/gensokyo/5424 said. Until they started lobbing insults at what was pretty clearly a typo and identifying themselves as a hypocrite.
Moving on, in my mind much of the problem of inactivity (within the current user-base. Won't go into 'new blood', though I think it wouldn't be entirely horrible. Some of you people really make reading threads a chore)stems from readers being unwilling to step outside their preferred genre's and such. That's understandable, and in a larger community probably wouldn't make as much of a difference. When you have new stories that have potential to them completely ignored for premise alone, at least here on TH-P, problems arise. To be honest, I have no real all-encompassing, or single solution to offer. All I can suggest is to give more stories a try, offer some critical advice where it's called for and read and vote more. Maybe add a line or two of commentary, even if just to say you enjoy the topic or appreciate the effort being put into a given story, I get the feeling it reassures writers. Granted, we can't coddle every special snowflake, and it is not beneficial for us to do so, but some stories are sadly neglected. Writers who express a desire to improve, working with decent (and creative)concepts among them. I am guilty of this, and am attempting to do better.
Writers themselves? I can't really speak for them. I know personally setting manageable deadlines for myself usually helps, but I'm also a notorious procrastinator. Genuine drive to write probably help this some, as well as when interest in taken in their stories. Either way, most of us appreciate the time and effort that goes into what you do.
Case-in-point:
>>/gensokyo/5307 I wouldn't if they were sorted by genre, though. I'd end up sticking solely to whatever board had the non-serious non-romantic comedy stories, because fuck stories that're about romancing touhous from the get-go and grimdark stories. Not singling you out, but I feel that the general sentiments you expressed might apply to a fair number of us here, including myself sometimes.
Plenty of good suggestions in the other thread for actual possible solutions. As well as a fair amount of unwarranted (at least on this scale) trolling of a user-base that is excitable to say the least. Shame on some of you. You know who you are.
I'm probably wrong about most of this, but I felt compelled to speak up, despite the 'discussion' thread being locked, which I hadn't noticed until most of this post was written. Might have something to do with the booze...
Therefore: Let's put suggestions as to how to actually improve the site in this out-of-the-way-little-noticed board. There really were a number of good ones that(
>>/gensokyo/5267 ,
>>/gensokyo/5226 ,
>>/gensokyo/5241 ,
>>/gensokyo/5323 ,
>>/gensokyo/5331 >>/gensokyo/5335 ,and
>>/gensokyo/5372) stand out as constructive and to-the-point, even if I do not agree with all of the sentiments expressed. If I remember I made this tomorrow I will try to post more of them here, and stay as objective as possible. Let's minimize the condescending attitudes, belittling, and trolling, for anyone who chooses to post in this thread. It does more harm than good as a site in the end. I will delete this topic if the site administrators feel it is an eyesore or redundant, but I figured I'd try to see if we can't throw a constructive spin on this topic, instead of lamenting and moping. Which, in my humble opinion, only serves to worsen whatever problems we may legitimately face, and seems to be one of the chief complaints.
Anonymous 2010/07/21 (Wed) 09:49 No. 747 ID: ▼ I apologize for that outburst, I got a bit too carried away with the debating and went too far. I apologize again for my undue criticism.
I must repeat that unlike what certain people think, merging the boards won't benefit anyone as no matter what board you merge with say /border/, there will be people who will be damned many times over before they'll read anything /border/ related.
And the notion of merging a busy board with a weak board won't work because the weaker board's stories would get swallowed by the stronger board's stories.
Merging boards won't help a PARTICULARLY subpar story because no matter what happens, people will avoid it based on word of mouth alone.
Though some sampler threads in /th/ (The most popular board) wouldn't be a bad idea; one for a general look at other board's stories (people have the bad habit of pidgeonholing certain boards) and one for would be newcomers to try their hand in a risk-free environment.
Another step we should take is encouraging people to try specific boards as opposed to just sticking a story in /th/ or /others/ just because they're popular. Such attention "seeking" makes certain problems worse (said boards being overcrowded, and certain boards being slow)
Anonymous 2010/07/27 (Tue) 03:01 No. 751 ID: ▼ I would like to speak concerning the one radical suggestion regarding removal of the imageboards and implementation of a fast forum structure with the following goals: (1) a reputation system, (2) the ability to send private messages to a writer, and (3) easier enforcement of rules.
I have never seen particular use for (1), outside settings where it's important to know a user's trustworthiness without looking through their history (e.g., answers/help sites). If someone has had good experiences with such a system, I'd like to hear its benefits. A system to fulfill (2) could be implemented on an imageboard (login forms with as much security as tripcodes are not difficult to write from scratch; likewise with messaging systems), but it's hard to think of a situation in which you wouldn't contact a writer by (a) posting in his thread, (b) finding him on IRC, (c) finding someone on IRC who can find him, or (d) using an address the writer has supplied (for which we have the email field). Since I have taken part in no storms-of-excrement I can't speak on the necessity of (3); is there really such a need? We're all (usually pretending to be) mature adults, here, despite our shared love of frilly hats. I don't think I need to mention the disadvantages of actually moving to a forum--here I'd just like to bring to discussion the validity and possible alternative solutions to the reasons given for such a move.
Anonymous 2010/07/27 (Tue) 03:18 No. 752 ID: ▼ Though some sampler threads in /th/ (The most popular board) wouldn't be a bad idea; one for a general look at other board's stories (people have the bad habit of pidgeonholing certain boards) and one for would be newcomers to try their hand in a risk-free environment. Please expand on this. I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
I wouldn't if they were sorted by genre, though. I'd end up sticking solely to whatever board had the [genre I prefer] Every reader has their own preferences. If we restructure boards by genre, then the set of readers who have narrow interests and lack the time or inclination to broaden their reading simply will not check other boards. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it is essentially what board divisions are supposed to do. In structuring the boards, we should first consider their purpose, beyond giving us a bunch of different pages to check. If we want to encourage readers to try different things (which seems like a reasonable goal), then we shouldn't give the boards any kind of defining, segregating features, either in terms of cast (as now) or genre (as proposed). It should be obvious why this isn't a practical solution.
Fortunately, there are other measures we can take for the same goal. A consolidated list of stories already exists. Two sorting functions would give new use to a list of stories: sorting by their creation date (thus finding the newest stories) and by the date of their last update (thus finding the most recently active stories at a single glance).
If we do not accept the goal of broadening reader interests, then sorting stories by genre is much more attractive. It seems reasonable that the people who would appreciate a story, but haven't checked it, are those who enjoy other stories of similar genre in another board. This only runs into problems when you have a story with significant cross-board appeal--this problem already exists, but would be far stronger if the differences between boards became more meaningful. That is, people who like the SDM crew and grimdark are more likely to check /forest/ for grimdark than they would be if it was a matter of leaving /grimdark/ and checking /romance/ (assuming a story that fit both genres).
Anonymous 2010/07/28 (Wed) 08:43 No. 754 ID: ▼ I mean two topics in /th/
One showing say outstanding example posts from a story with the synopsis of it as to show people that so and so board isn't just say NEETs, Soldiers and space sagas (/Eientei/) or YAF's fagfest (/Shrine/)
I think the current system is nice if someone's in the mood to read about certain characters, and possibly as a way for some of them to shine. It helps set up a general direction of writing. The only flaws are: The Village/Temple aren't exactly neatly included in anything and too many people post in /th/ for the sole sake of popularity when they'd have been better served in another board. That and there was a few stories that would have fit /others/ far better than /th/.
As far as the newbie thread? It's a chance for a newbie writer to try writing something to get reviewed without the trouble of making a new thread. This way s/he'd get some critism and improve before fully committing to making a thread. I'm hoping it would encourage some to actually try writing despite fears they might suck.
Anonymous 2011/06/22 (Wed) 18:46 No. 865 ID: ▼ Except that something like a newbie thread would rather be used as an insult.
Don't think that every Anonymous is ready to give constructive criticism.
Being a critic is difficult. A good critic must be patient, attentive, and more or less flawless.
