IMPORTANT- Poll

[phantisma.livejournal.com]

Hey everyone, your friendly neighborhood mod here. Under the cut you will find a poll that we would like everyone with any interest in the community to respond to. We will be implementing some changes to the comm based on responses and the discussion it generates, both with the users and the mod committee.

This comm has grown well beyond anything I anticipated when we started out and I want us to continue to be a welcoming, happy place for folks while easing some strain and making things easier behind the scenes, so please take a minute and answer the questions. The poll will stay open until Wednesday.





[Poll #1743747]

Comments

[samueljames]

Very happy with the way things are but the idea of being able to prompt on the weekend is appealing.

I have no figures to back things up but the comm seems less busy than it used to be. Perhaps people might have more time to write at weekends. I know I tend to save prompts on Delicious for whenever I might get the time or the inspiration to write them.

Just a note on responses I chose twice a week going by averages. Sometimes I don't write and other times it would be more than two so I just guestimated.

[obsessivemuch1.livejournal.com]

I'm probably not the best person to fill in the survey, since I'm very particular about what fic I write, but I've done so anyway.

But I only respond to prompts in my current fandom (SG1) which deal with one of two pairings or one character. That's a very narrow window, which is why I've not posted much.

And that's probably not very helpful, sorry.

[x-varda-x.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I never reply to prompts cos I only write SGA, and within that only Rodney whump. I suppose it all depends on who else belongs to the comm and posts prompts.

[x-varda-x.livejournal.com]

Is there a way to have an any fandom/any character prompt day? (unless you've already done this and I've missed it...) Because from the few posts that I've looked through, there's never anything that I'm interested in writing (ie: SGA, Rodney gen or het)

Like:
any/any - aliens made them do it
any/any - escape from prison

Not that I can guarantee that I'd participate

[phantisma.livejournal.com]

Those kinds of prompts are not ever forbidden, and while not exactly what the community was designed for, they do happen.

If they fit the theme they can be prompted on theme days, and anything can be prompted on free for all days.

[jennytork.livejournal.com]

I don't participate in the lonely prompts because trying to find them and post them "in the correct format" is too time consuming for me. I think it would be better to have them by SHOW instead of by topic and to not have the challenges at all. Going through all the massive amounts of topics and trying to find ones for the shows I watch and write in is just too time consuming. And trying to figure out WHERE to post the prompts and WHAT "the correct format" is is just overwhelming.

It needs to be streamlined. It's clunky and time-consuming the way it is.

I am intimidated by the challenges -- I don't have time to do more than one or two and therefore what's the point of entering if there's no chance to win with "the most"? -- and I wish they would go away.

[havenward.livejournal.com]

Hi there! I'm the mod in charge of the archives, and believe me, I hear you regarding the time it takes for the archives to load etc. It's something I'm looking into, but given the utter size of the archives as a whole, fixing that will be more than just switching away from Delicious.

However, I do want to have a better idea of what you mean with your other statements.

Do you mean you do not participate in lonely prompt challenges because how to format your submission is not clearly stated in the instructions? (I know you've stated you don't like the challenges in general, I'm just confused by what you're trying to say.) If not, I'm not sure what you mean by formatting lonely prompts - they should already be formatted, and you just need to write fic. Do you mean you don't like having to format prompts regularly?

As for the lonely prompt listings - are you referring to on the community here on LJ, or on the Delicious archive account? There are some 5300 tags (including completed prompts and crossovers, which are not currently listed by their separate fandoms) - listing these out in a community page would be vastly time consuming and hard for monkeys to ensure that all fandoms are represented appropriately. In fact it's part of the reason we moved away from our original archiving format on codemonkeys.

However, on the Delicious account, further down the sidebar (Below the genre listings) there is a listing for "All Tags". Aside from the slowness of Delicious itself, is this also problematic? Is there a way you'd like these better represented?

[oroburos69.livejournal.com]

Mostly, I shifted out of the fandoms represented in this comm, so yeah, not that into it anymore. But when I was a guest host, I noticed that there was a metric ton of unanswered prompts.

I think you need to make it so more people answer instead of just spamming their five prompts, which won't be answered anyway. Maybe have days where the person who answers the most prompts gets to be a guest host for a day or something. Have a policy that demands prompt five prompts, answer at least one in exchange. Or you're allowed two prompts for every prompt you answer.

Maybe a special day or something where you get to make only one prompt, but get an extra prompting opportunity for every prompt you answer.

Something, anyway. It's silly how many unanswered prompts there are.

[chiana606.livejournal.com]

I like your ideas about prompt two, answer one (though I suppose it would be a bit hard for me at times, because my fandoms pretty much consist of Little Women, a handful of musicals, True Blood, and a handful of classic novels. But when people do prompt for those things, I try to answer.) :)

A couple off the wall ideas

[chibifukurou]

Idea 1: I'm not sure if anybody else here has been following the Yuletide comm this year but they've been doing posts, where they highlight one finished story and one lonely prompt each day.

I was thinking it might be interesting if in addition to the theme posts, guest hosts could do a second daily post, giving a link to one of their favorite comment fics and one of the prompts that they would most like to see filled.

Idea 2: I don't know if other people have been having this problem but I'm a small fandom writer and lately it seems like I'm having to page through tons of prompts in the larger fandoms(Such as DC, SPN, and Leverage) in order to find any prompts I'd be interested in filling.

I was wondering if there was a way to introduce a 'comment tree' method of leaving prompts. What I mean is, after making the theme post the host would make a series of comments. For instance: A Doctor Who comment, A SPN comment, A Leverage comment, A DC comment, An Author's Choice comment, A Japanese Media comment, A RPS comment, and A Misc comment.

Then anybody who was prompting a SPN themed prompt would reply to the SPN comment and anybody who wanted to prompt a Doctor Who prompt would reply to the Doctor Who comment. I'm pretty sure you can see where I'm going with this.

Idea 3: 'Retro' prompt days. One day a week when people go into the lonely prompts and pull out the prompts they would love to see filled. Then instead of commenting with new prompts people would rewrite the original prompt in a comment, and include a link to the original prompt.

That way we could build up interest in the older prompts, because I know that I don't always have the patience to go through the lonely prompt archive looking for something interesting to write.

Re: A couple off the wall ideas

[chibifukurou]

I forgot to say, but I want to thank all of the mod squad so much for all the hard work they've put into this comm!

[momma-66.livejournal.com]

I try to answer *at least* one prompt a week. Sometimes that doesn't happen and I love the lonely "weekend" days, whether that is an actual weekend or moved to another two days. It's not a bad idea to have some days where no prompts are accepted. I don't even mind that there isn't a "prize" any more. I'm extremely competitive and use lonely weekends to one up peeps that don't even know I'm participating.

I'll admit that lately the reason I haven't answered as many prompts as I use to is because it's almost impossible to access the delicious site and the idea that only lonely prompts would be indexed would be wonderful. I know that everyone wants to read the AMAZING fic that is written because of this community and maybe it's about time to introduce a post where answered prompts can be posted. And by answered, I'm thinking it would be the commenter's responsibility. Much like a kinkmeme's filled prompt post. It doesn't need to be organized, really. Because it's not a big deal to troll through and find something. I am someone though that enjoys over twenty fandoms at any given time; it's what I love about commentfic.

And not to seem like some tyrant but limiting the amount of prompts accepted each day might not be a bad idea. I cannot stress enough how awesome commentfic is, but it can be overwhelming the amount of prompting to answering that is going on.

I may have misread some of the above polling. It's Saturday, and apparently the last day before Hell on Earth, I've enjoyed some time for beer, anyways.

Maybe more free for alls and less themed days too. Not that theme days aren't amazing, but waiting *all week* to prompt that one AWESOME prompt that has been plaguing would be cool.

After all that rambling I do want to say a HUGE thank you to the Mods, Code Monkies and Guest Hosts that help this community along every week. I love commentfic, even when I don't have enough time for my landcomm I make sure to check out each and every post made here. You've introduced me to fandom I wouldn't haven't even thought of and challenged me to write fandom/pairing/prompt I might never had otherwise tried.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see more challenges with prizes, even if it's just a Most Lonely Prompts Filled banner. It's a good incentive and I think it would encourage people to fill the Lonely Prompts.

Also, as a small fandom writer myself (Gormenghast, Yami no Matsuei), I have to admit, sometimes the coverage that the Big Name Fandoms get is enough to break my heart, so I'd like to see more small fandom days.

Also, I think the filled prompts need to be split off into their own Delicious account, since I think that's partly why the Index can be so hard to load, even if you have a high speed Internet connection. I'm on a fiber optic service and it sometimes takes forever to load or it makes my browser freeze temporarily.

Edited to add, and most important!: Thanks for all the hard work the Code Monkeys and the mods put in! This is a wicked awesome comm!

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

A few more thoughts: I'm seconding someone else who posted that the crossovers should be retagged so that it reads something like "Lonely!Fandom!", "Lonely!fandomB","Crossover" rather than "Lonely!FandomA/fandomB". It would eliminate a lot of tags, freeing up space in the Delicious account, and it would make it a heck of a lot easier to search for them, since the tags sometimes get too long for the sidebar, and sometimes I'm typing fics on my iPad which doesn't have that hover option.

[ex-idleleav.livejournal.com]

Reposting comment because I arsed up and posted it from the wrong account. -_-

***

There do seem to be an awful lot of unanswered prompts. I mean, that's going to happen with this kind of comm, but I wouldn't want to see the Lonely Prompts days disappear. I'm not a fast writer, and if I do answer prompts, it's generally some time after they're posted. (And that's why I didn't answer the question on how often I answer prompts, because it's more than never but less than once a week.)

I love, love, love having an index of all the unfilled prompts - it's one of the things that sets this comm apart, for me, in terms of awesomeness. The Delicious account, though, tends to be be super-slow and difficult-to-load for me, though I use Delicious with other accounts and it works fine. (Also, although the prompts I've left for one particular fandom have never been filled, I can't find the index for that fandom under the unfilled lists. I could just be blind.) I wonder if it's just the sheer number of bookmarks that's making the Delicious account load and run poorly. I'd maybe suggest splitting it into two accounts (one for completed and one for lonely) but that would be an absolute crapton of work and would take an insane amount of time, so, yeah, not really reasonable.

Back to the issue of so many unanswered prompts: would it be reasonable to perhaps lower the limit per prompter, to, IDK, maybe two or three instead of five?

I do love this comm, even if I don't participate as often as I would like. ♥ Hats off to all of you for keeping this running and being so awesome.

[nonky.livejournal.com]

This might just be a problem I have, but using the Lonely Prompt listing is fairly problematic. I get a lot of script failure warnings, and eventually the pages just stop loading. Usually, to get to a prompt, I have to click through all the levels of organization, use the link to take me back to the appropriate forum post, and by then my tab with the Lonely Prompts has frozen or goes into an endless loading cycle.

I enjoy the comm as it operates now, but I'm sure someone could think of an idea that would make me happier with it. The Delicious site does make Lonely Prompt weekends pretty hard going.

(I'd love suggestions if anyone has a fix.)

[misura.livejournal.com]

Seconding this comment - I don't even try to access the index at home, although I do try accessing it at work sometimes (in my lunch break, of course) where it takes five minutes or so for each 'layer'. It's a size problem, I guess, so not really something that can be 'fixed'.

On the other hand, especially for smaller fandoms, it seems a shame to have fic out there and have nobody know about it, so only indexing the unfilled prompts doesn't seem quite the thing either.

Retro prompt day sounds like a great idea to drag some of the older prompts back up, while also indicating to potential writers which prompts are still 'current' (since someone also mentioned feeling a little disappointed by prompters not replying to fills).

[gladdecease]

I don't really have any suggestions for new policies, just a comment I'm sure you've gotten before: Delicious runs very slowly when I look through the lonely prompts section. I doubt moving to a different site would do much to help there, considering just how many prompts there are, and I can't imagine splitting up the archive into multiple accounts would help much.

Still, it is problematic, and if you can find a way to counter that problem, I know I (and many others) would appreciate it.

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

I don't tend to post prompts any more unless I find something I want to fill, and my writing mojo has been rather uncooperative of late, so I'm not sure I could fill the poll out with any sort of accuracy.

I'm actually commenting on the popularity of the prize challenges. I wondered if you knew about the remixed comm, which gives 500 LJ tokens (one 'payment' per user) for header competition submissions every month. If you could organise a regular team of graphic artists, you could use the tokens as prizes.

[phantisma.livejournal.com]

The problem with challenges and prizes, even LJ tokens, is that they cost money. When prizes were offered in the past, it all came out of my pocket...which got to be problematic, if you know what I mean.

[berryblue-girl.livejournal.com]

One thing I have a bit of a problem is the lonely prompts pages. There are so many prompts that it takes a while for the page to load. An idea I have is after a certain amount of time (perhaps 6 months), delete the prompt if it remains unanswered. That could cut down on the crowding.

[jo-mako.livejournal.com]

As I'm relatively new here, I admit that I'm not familiar with 'the old days'. I am definitely liking this comm and bravo to the mods, codemonkeys, and guest hosts who make it what it is.

I play when I can. Until this week, it was filling prompts, but I did submit 2 earlier this week. I'm more keen for free for all days than the themed ones. My only hiccup with delicious is the time it takes to load. I haven't had any trouble navigating it through the tags...but then I'm pretty easy to please over there.

Pretty much would like to see more free for all days. And maybe for a themed day, 'obscure/small fandoms only' once in a while.

[melodious329.livejournal.com]

This is must a random personal opinion but I did want to share my thoughts. My muse doesn't generally work fast enough to fill a prompt on the same day it's posted, so when I have time to play, I spend a lot of time browsing through the lonely prompts so I personally enjoy having weekends without new prompts and I definitely still want both lonely prompts and filled prompts to be indeed because I also just like to read filled prompts but only those in my fandoms.

I also don't play every week. I'll go a couple weeks without spending any time looking through prompts, but when I do play, I usually fill several lonely prompts that day. But I do admit that the delicious account is difficult to look through.

[chiana606.livejournal.com]

I would love occasional small fandoms days (Maye even something like a bi-weekly Small Fandom Saturday). Deciding what counts as a small fandom could be tricky, but I think members could probably just be trusted to use their best judgement.

Other than that, I agree with those who say that delicious account is impossible to load. If I could read the lonely prompts, I'd be all over them! On that note, on lonely prompt weekends, if I just went through random entries on the com, answered prompts, and linked, would that mess things up for the codemonkeys? I'm not sure if some prompts would have already made the lonely prompts index or not, etc.

Contests and things are fun. Maybe do a lonely prompts week or something like that soon, to try and decrease the massive, massive amounts of lonely prompts a bit?

I'm a newbie on this comm, but I'm really enjoying it, so thanks to all who maintain it! :)

[ex-idleleav.livejournal.com]

I would love occasional small fandoms days

Me, too. The fandoms I'm most invested in right now all qualify as small. It'd be neat to have a small-fandom-centric day once in a while--maybe those who are mostly invested in big fandoms would take the time out to shower some love on their smaller fandoms, too. ♥ Maybe.

Thanks mods and code-monkeys!

[truthwritaslies.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that maybe on lonely prompt days you could go into the LJ-archive and randomly pick 5 or 10 old posts, link to them and those would be the prompts that everyone got to pick from for that day.



I think part of the problem with getting fills for smaller or more obscure fandoms is that some of them are hard to find or no longer on air or whatever.

For example: I'd love to write fills for some of the interesting Tanz Der Vampire fandom, but I can't even find a copy of the movie it was originally based on.

On the other hand, I'd love to prompt something for Mozart L'Opera Rock but I've held off because I've never seen even one other prompt for it (though I haven't gone through EVERY post in the LJ archive yet) and I don't want to have a prompt up that has zero chance of being filled.

Re: Thanks mods and code-monkeys!

[creepy_shetan]

Hmmm... Do you mean the mods pick the prompts, or the comm members? If the mods, I think it'd be better to choose, say, a certain day or month from the past as the "theme" -- all the lonely prompts in those posts are eligible. That way writers who have problems with Delicious won't be deterred and can instead pull up the comm's archive pages on LJ, using the subject titles as a rough guide.

With rare and obscure fandoms, you just have to be willing to take that chance. I've found that the reward is well worth the risk, and dude is it especially sweet when you find that someone actually filled your prompt after you've begun to think that no one ever would. It might take time, but this comm is still growing -- a fellow fan may stumble upon it, you never know. ^_^

[angelus2hot]

It's rare that I have the time to post a comment fic on the day it's posted. I can't use the delicious site. It freezes my computer everytime and I'm on dsl. At first I thought it was because my computer was old but it does the same thing to my new one. So now I save all of the prompts that I'm interested in on a notepad(along with links). That way I'll have the prompts ready instead of having to go back through the whole comm to find one I'm interested in.

I like the idea of small fandom day once in a while. There are an awful lot of prompts for the larger fandoms that the smaller fandoms either get buried or don't get prompted probably because people figure what's the point.

Maybe sections for fandoms like Real People can have a section, SPN, Leverage and so on...that way it might give the other fandom prompts a chance to be noticed. A lot of people aren't interested in RP(SPN, Leverage, so on) and won't go through a ton of prompts just to find the fandom they're interested in.

In addition to the lonely prompts, maybe have one instead of including all of the lonely prompts ever posted choose a day instead like Sad Songs, Firsts or Cliches(those were just the first ones to come to mind) and only accept fills for that section only...

And if someone goes through the tags and doesn't see their fandom(s) listed she/he will probably assume that fandom isn't allowed. I know I thought the same thing with Andromeda, Moonlight...etc


This is an awesome comm! Thank you to everyone who has a hand in keeping it running. :D

[pooka-07.livejournal.com]

I know it's already been said that solutions to the problem with delicious are being looked into, but I'm just gonna throw an idea out there. What about if not only are the lonely and completed prompts are separated, but within each of those categories, everything's separated?

What I mean is, instead of have one large archive for all lonely prompts, there are multiple lonely prompt archives that are categories like: TV shows, Movies, Books, etc? And the same could go for completed prompts as well.

I'm not sure how that could be worked on with the codemonkeys, as far as who's in charge of what. It could be kept the same, where one person takes care of a certain day, and they'd have to go through each archive, or there could be one person who takes care of TV show lonely and completed (or maybe even just lonely) prompts, etc. I guess it would depend on how many people are available, and whatnot.

I don't know, just a thought.

[nocowardsoul]

One little suggestion. Right now the comment pages display in the community's style. If the comment pages were displayed in the plain Livejournal style, I for one would be more likely to browse through old posts.

[phantisma.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the difference is? Can you be more clear about why you feel that way?

[daria234.livejournal.com]

First of all, THANK YOU for your hard work! It really is appreciated!

I see why people don't like all the unfilled prompts, but I think too many limits on prompts makes it harder for writers to find something that inspires them; maybe for the small fandom issue, still have a limit of 4 or 5 prompts per person, but no more than 1 prompt per fandom? That way, more diversity of prompts, but no added problem of not enough prompts to choose from.

I know that it is hard with all the old prompts, but I really like being able to have prompts from longer than 6 months ago, so I respectfully disagree with that suggestion.

I also second the suggestions made by others: to have a 'retro' day where people can reprompt old unfilled prompts, and the idea of a contest for whoever fills the most prompts to get to choose the theme. Maybe even have a week where whoever gets the most prompts filled by midnight PST gets to choose the theme for the next day, and so on and so forth all week (with a rule against the same person winning twice in a row).

Also, maybe during the contests, someone could get a free "fic" if they pimp in their lj or on a comm with one of the banners - so if they wrote 5 fics and pimped, it would count as six fics, e.g. It seems like pimpage has more to do with comm activity it than comm policies from my admittedly limited knowledge.

[camshaft22.livejournal.com]

A huge Thank you to the Mods!

One thing I forgot to add... We may not be able to do this at all, but is there a way to find a filled prompt? Like you filled one ages ago and want to find your fic, could there be a way to do that?

Also: Guest Hosting. There was a link and everything... and I think I applied a while back but was never given even a note saying Thanks but no thanks or anything.

[havenward.livejournal.com]

Poking my head in again - on Delicious there is a search function. If you remember your prompt, you should be able to type it in the top right hand search bar and receive results first for the commentfic account, and then for Delicious as a whole. (Because of the size of our archives, it does glitch and occasionally return 0 results when it's not true, and you should type in the prompt portion -as opposed to fandom/pairing- exactly if possible.) I wish we could be more exact, but our archive is nearly 68k prompts large (and growing) and online archiving simply can't manage it appropriately. :/ If we switch archiving systems, it is a point that I will look for to make as easy as possible.

As for guest hosting, please contact cyphersushi directly. She's our calendar mod, and should be able to help you out with what happened. Especially since we may change which are theme days, this is important. :)

[elwing-alcyone.livejournal.com]

This might not be the sort of thing the post is meaning to discuss, but so many people have been pointing out about Delicious lagging. So, I have a suggestion that might help with that.

You know when people prompt crossovers? Say, Leverage/Supernatural? And the bookmark gets tagged lonely!SPN/Leverage - I'd say do away with that. Giving every possible crossover its own tag means way too many tags. How about just tagging it lonely!SPN lonely!Leverage lonely!Crossover. Then that's using tags that already exist instead of making a new one just for the crossover.

One of the cool things about Delicious is it lets you combine tags, so people looking specifically for Leverage/Supernatural crossovers could just plug in "lonely!Leverage" and "lonely!Supernatural" in the "Type a tag" field at the top. Or "lonely!Leverage" and "lonely!Crossover" if they wanted all Leverage crossover prompts - the cool thing about that would be that "related tags" would bring up a list of all the fandoms Leverage has been crossed over with in the prompts, so people could skim down for fandoms they know and add that to their search to see what's been prompted.

I mean, right there, that would get rid of >2000 tags, and might really help with the lagging. We couldn't use the Crossovers bundle anymore, but that hasn't worked for me for months anyway.

I know this would be a lot of work for the codemonkeys, but... well, as a codemonkey myself, I'd be happy to do some/lots/all of it. :) It might necessitate a Delicious tutorial, like someone up there suggested, but overall I think it would work better.

Just throwing it out there, anyway!

[creepy_shetan]

That's true. I forgot about that. When you start typing a tag, doesn't Delicious autofill / suggest tags found in the comment_fic archive? You could look up any combination of lonely or completed fandom tags to see if it even exists.
I always have the problem of figuring out: whether a crossover prompt would be listed under A/B or B/A; or, when there are more than two fandoms, what specific order A, B, C, and so on would be listed. It's hard to keep all that organized when using individual crossover tags.

The only problem would be any tags that already have too many prompts filed under them w/o crossovers included as well... There'd easily be hundreds to look through.

[sagaluthien.livejournal.com]

Latley (last months) I have not left many prompts or replied on any much because I have litmitid time, as been into writings block and tried to concentrate on other challange I signed up for + that my computer isn't trustworthy and can shut of when ever.

I really like this community, get used to how it is and as soon as things turns out better for me I so count on to getting back to take part more

For prompts that have been posted and I would like to comment back to I've saved at delicius and through there I can go back and see if it got filled or I still have a chance to do it.

[strongwriter.livejournal.com]

Hit enter before I could put my comment - I'm going to have to agree with a majority of commenters and say that I have major issues with Delicious. Unless I'm desperate to write, I usually don't flip through them.