Posting Schedule, Tags and AO3

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

Yes, another mod-post. And temporary Sticky Post. This will probably happen more often, at least until many of the "big" kinks have been worked out.

The Calendar is now closed for the year. A new entry will be set up at the beginning of December to start signing up for 2015. If you've signed up to be a pinch-hitter, I will keep you on the list for the new year. January 1st and 2nd will be a round-up of all the filled prompts from December. I hope there will be a lot!

The posting schedule: Currently it's set as Lonely Prompts on Sunday, Themes are Monday-Friday and the Free-For-All on Saturday. What I'd like to know from you, the prompter and filler, is if this schedule is working for you or if you think something else should be done? I know weekly was mentioned in the poll from last week (2 weeks ago?) and it wasn't favorable. I guess what I'm curious about are what's done on Saturday and Sunday. Something that was mentioned in comments was reverting back to the posting schedule we had before: Monday-Thursday for themes, Friday for Free-For-All and leaving the weekend to Lonely Prompts. Anyone have opinions on this?

I'm also thinking about adding a Weekly Round-Up of all the filled prompts from the week. This will likely be posted late Saturday night or early Sunday Morning (hopefully before the Lonely Prompt entry on Sunday or after the Free-For-All entry on Saturday). Something that was mentioned in comments got me to thinking about having 2 weekly round-up posts. They would still be on Saturday and Sunday, but the one on Saturday night would be for completed fills and the one on Sunday would, again hopefully, go up before the Lonely Prompts entry.

With as many unfilled/lonely prompts as there are, I've decided that Lonely Prompt Week will happen the last week of March, June, September and December. If you feel this should happen more or less frequently, please let me know in the comments.

Tags: When I first joined the community about 3 years ago, I looked at the tags and they were a confusing jumble to me. I never went back. For those who use them, how are they working for you? Should they be changed?

Of course, I have some ideas, but don't want to give them. I don't want anyone to feel they should have to agree with my way. While my say is final as owner, there are 2,081 people watching the community (and 1,851 actual members) and I'd like to hear what you all have to say before I make any final decisions.

As a side note, does anyone know who runs codemonkeys? It looks like it's been a while since it was updated and I wanted to know if they'd be interested in picking it up again.

AO3: NEW NEW NEW! We will be using AO3 to bookmark filled prompts. Basically we'll be adding of anything that's posted, but they all lead back to the community, unless someone's posted the link to a filled fic and it was someplace else, then we will use that link. if you've filled a prompt and posted it to AO3, please add it to the collection. They're grouped by year. Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2008, Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2009, Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2010, Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2011, Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2012, Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2013, and Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2014. If you filled a prompt given in a previous year, please add it to both collections. For example, if you filled a prompt from 2013 in the year 2014, the fic would be added to both collections.

This is going to be a very slow going process and right now there is one person going through the entries here looking for links to filled fics. If you'd like to help, please comment here with your AO3 username so that I can give you access to help.

Comments

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

That sounds good to me.

Regarding pinch hits - perhaps at this point, to help with the backlog, until the end of the year, instead of a pinch hit, maybe just have those days/weeks be for lonely prompts.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Regarding pinch hits - perhaps at this point, to help with the backlog, until the end of the year, instead of a pinch hit, maybe just have those days/weeks be for lonely prompts.

I think that's a brilliant idea.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

I like the way the weekend is handled now. I think having a free for all is always a good idea after a full week of themes, and the lonely prompts day is a nice follow-up on that :) And YAY to the lonely prompts weeks!

A weekly round up sounds fantastic. I don't mind going into the threads separately, and look for fills, but a round-up would be ideal. Also, I didn't know there were AO3 collections... *blush* Will add the fills to them now!

As far as tagging goes, I hardly use them so I won't give my opinion :P

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

You've just given me another idea for the weekly round up. It's a bit more work, but I don't mind. lol

The AO3 collection was just created Sunday from a suggestion that was made and since I practically live at AO3 looking for fic in new fandoms I thought the suggestion was a good one for here.

[tigriswolf]

I second everything tattooeddevil said.

I use the "free for all" tag every Saturday but I've barely ever glanced at the other tags because they made no sense.

About the lonely prompts weeks -- will it be the same format as the Sunday posts, where people post links to prompts they'd like filled? Will it be themed lonely prompts? I remember from a couple years ago, they used to have themed challenges, I think. I'd prefer linking back, myself.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the themed challenges. It might have been from before I was actively following the community.

I'm thinking linking back to the prompts that people would like to have filled would be the way to go.

[sasha-b.livejournal.com]

I think a weekly round up would be awesome.

And the tags are super confusing and do need to be updated. I don't use them at all right now. My biggest peeve is how hard it is to find the lonely prompts that need to be filled - but it sounds like y'all are working on that, so awesome. :)

[saavikam77.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna echo others' statements that the tags are a straight up mess. I've had the worst trouble finding anything, and when I do manage to find the lonely prompts links, that's all a mess, too.

Also, I really liked the way the week was set up before, with 4 themes, Free-for-all Fridays, and lonely prompts for the weekend. I feel like 5 themes a week can be a little too much, especially if we don't want the lonely prompts to build up.

I do also love the idea of a weekly round-up, and lonely prompt weeks.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

So you'd like to go back to the way things were before with the schedule? I think I sort of remember how that went.

Monday-Thursday for themes, Friday for Free-For-All and Saturday & Sunday for lonely prompts

[classics-lover.livejournal.com]

A weekly round-up sounds good, or maybe a recommend-a-fill day?

Seconding evil_little_dog's suggestions that pinch-hits focus on Lonely Prompts. Maybe Lonely Prompt Themes? e.g. Lonely Drabbles, Lonely Kink, Lonely AU, etc. Just a thought.

I don't think I ever used the tags. Maybe once or twice, but they were so confusing that I found it easier to use LJ's Advanced Search to find Lonely Prompts to fill. A re-jig of the tags would certainly be a help.

If there's anything else you need, just let me know :D

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

Can you tell me more about this recommend-a-fill day.

[blythechild.livejournal.com]

Thumbs up to weekly round-up!

Also, I had no idea about the AO3 bookmarks. Since every fill I post eventually makes it to my AO3 account, I'll be sure to link things appropriately now ;)

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

The AO3 collection was just created Sunday from a suggestion that was made and since I practically live at AO3 looking for fic in new fandoms I thought the suggestion was a good one for here.

[scribblemyname]

If it makes anyone feel better, the AO3 comm is new. Brand, spanking new. :grins:

[ncisvu-lj.livejournal.com]

I'm super excited about the AO3 collection!!

As for lonely prompt weeks... what if there was some sort of prize/reward for participating or filling the most prompts or something to motivate people to write fills? Something simple like a banner or icon for participants and/or for the person who fills the most prompts and/or the people who fill at least 1 prompt a day, etc.

[creepy_shetan]

The mods of some years ago used to hold contests and challenges and give the winners banners. I think they did: most fills in one fandom, most fandoms filled, most fills posted overall during the challenge weekend, and maybe a couple of others. I can't remember. 6^^;; It would probably motivate more people to write, especially if they have a full week to participate.

[lynne-monstr.livejournal.com]

Love the idea of an AO3 collection!

The idea of themed lonely prompts sounds pretty cool, too.

[bk_forever]

I've added my paltry two fills to the AO3 collection! There are two more, but I haven't posted them to my account yet, I'm so far behind it's not funny.

As for the tags, I tried to use them once but gave up, I wasn't getting anywhere.

Love the idea of lonely prompts weeks!

[draycevixen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for creating the AO3 collection.

Also, I like the way the com is currently structured with the five daily themes as inevitably some appeal when others don't and I can't always predict which day I'll be available to play.

I also really like the idea of the lonely prompt weeks.

[scribblemyname]

Thoughts on tagging:

I did think the whole prompts by fandom thing made sense, but they stopped tagging the posts years ago, so it's now useless to try to find lonely prompts that way.

I like the idea of including fandom and themes as tags on however we track prompts and maybe characters/pairings. I don't know if there's a lot of value of that on the LiveJournal posts though at this point. It'd be a lot of back-tagging. Usually I just browse a month's archives and read off the titles for a theme that sounds promising for lonely prompts I might want to fill.

On the fills bookmarks, I am tagging for theme and filling out the fandom, characters, relationships fields but otherwise leaving untagged and only adding rating where it's noted by the fill author in the comment.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

My thought on tagging with fandoms is that unless the theme is specifically for that fandom, you run the risk of tagging for every single fandom imaginable...unless this is after the fact tagging, then I can see adding the fandom.

My way around that, I guess, would be with weekly round up posts for lonely prompts.

[lasairfhiona.livejournal.com]

Love the idea of an AO3 area. Would it be tagged for fandoms?

Since I rarely do lonely prompts, all of my fills are on AO3 by year as a "series"

[scribblemyname]

AO3 bookmarks have a fandom field and are filterable/sortable by fandom. Also the works have exploded and have that field.

[falconwhitaker.livejournal.com]

I've added all but one of my AO3 fills to the bookmarks! The problem with the last fill is that I know when I wrote it (2012), but not when the prompt was made. I've searched the Delicious page and I can't find it there at all. Should I just put it under the year that I wrote it?

Also, might it be a good idea to create a new mod post just for questions about the AO3 bookmarks?

[scribblemyname]

Yes to the year.

[jordannamorgan]

I prefer having free-for-all day on Saturdays. :)

[creepy_shetan]

Calendar: Okay!

Pinch-hitters: I think a reminder of who's on the pinch-hitter list would be helpful. (I thought I was on it, but I was never asked to pinch-hit.)

Posting schedule: I'm not really picky either way. ^_^

Weekly round-up: I really like the idea, but I'm a little confused on the two posts part. Why make two posts in one weekend? (Also, the round-up is only for fills posted during that week, right? So is it just fills of that week's prompts, or older prompts that happened to be filled that week, too?)

Lonely prompt weeks: Holding them at the end of every quarter of the year is just right to me. ^_^

Tags: I used to use the codemonkeys LJ account and the Delicious tags when I first joined, but then Delicious changed and the coders disappeared for a while... I switched to LJ's advanced search options, but it's not perfect (pulls up prompts that have been filled already, some users don't want their posts/comments to be searchable, etc). Organizing it by fandom and by theme made sense when the comm was smaller. It got especially confusing to me when looking through crossover, RPF, and author's choice tags. It got to the point where it would've been easier to start tagging from scratch than to fill in missing parts (which I see is what you chose to do!).

AO3: I like the collections, and the bookmarks for writers who aren't on AO3, but won't it get redundant for writers with AO3 accounts? Well, I guess not all of the c-f/AO3 writers would cross-post everything from here to AO3. (I personally don't if the fill is < 50 words.) And it's possible that, even if the fills were on AO3, not everyone would add them to the collections...
My argument is falling apart, ahaha. 6>_>;;
Err, sooooo... Let's say 20 c-f/AO3 ppl have their fills in both bookmarks and collections. Each person has written at least 10 fills. That's at least 200 entries that are double-marked. (Possibly even triple-marked or quadruple-marked if the fill is in two different collection and bookmark years.) If another person was browsing for something to read in both sections, they'd keep seeing duplicates, and idk, get confused or frustrated or something.

An idea I had a while back: a post listing c-f prompt fillers. It'd have their LJ name(s) and a link to their personal fic masterlist on LJ or a separate site (writing comm, writing journal, ff.net, AO3, etc). I was mainly interested in this for fills that are part of a series and for authors who go by multiple names. There could be a link to it in c-f's profile.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

in regards to AO3, if the fic is already posted to AO3 and linked here, all we're asking is that the author add it to the collection(s) and we wouldn't bookmark the link from here. So yes it could be listed twice, but I don't see it being listed more than that.

The bookmarked link is easy enough to remove if it's pointed out to us the author has posted their story to AO3 so the bookmarked link can be removed.

Likewise, if there's an author who doesn't want their work to be bookmarked on AO3 and we have by accident, we can easily remove and create a list, for ourselves, of authors who don't want their works crossposted like that.

[falkner]

"Monday-Thursday for themes, Friday for Free-For-All" would be great. Since it's not allowed to leave prompts on previous posts people who like me often can't be online on weekends would miss all the free for all posts.

For the tags, I think something useful would be to get rid of all the current fandom specific tags and instead use more general tags to indicate the themes so browsing the community would be much more easier (things like 'alternate universes', 'seasons', 'elements', etc.).

query on spoilers

[tigriswolf]

Can I ask that we have clarification on the no spoilers in prompts rule? Like, old fandoms are fair game, sure, but when does something stop being a spoiler for people not in the fandom? I'm thinking a few months, maybe?

I'm asking because of and a hope that I can start being clearer in the rules on the free for all posts.

Re: query on spoilers

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

If something has aired for 95% of the world (yes, I know hard to gauge that), it's no longer a spoiler. But I've seen other communities say that something stops being a spoiler a week after it's aired.

That being said, if it is a month after something has aired for the person leaving the prompt it is no longer a spoiler. If they absolutely want to leave a prompt for something current, maybe you can link to the FAQ about spoiler tags http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq/75.html

[yyzeff.livejournal.com]

Collections, yesssssssssss. *adds them all* *oh my God I've done a lot this year*

Although there's the risk of some redundancy, I actually think that's a good thing. It makes it easier to find something. (Though since I post 99% to AO3 and link from here, that skews my view on it; I think the only things I never put on AO3 were the 3-sentence fills.)

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

You are free to add anything you've written and posted to AO3 to the collection.

[falkner]

I believe it would be useful to have a rule for guest hosts to put the theme for the day in the title of the entry, so that on the archive/calendar page it would be possible to tell at glance what each day's theme was and browsing older entries would be easier.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That is one of the new "rules" that will be stressed next year. and I will remind future hosters to do so as well.

[tigriswolf]

Okay, so, if December is a Lonely Prompts month, will there still be a free for all on Saturdays?

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

No. Lonely prompts 7 days a week. There are probably close to a thousand prompts for people to pick from so I'm hoping to get them done, especially the older ones, before adding anymore to them.

Thanks for asking that. I should mention it in my entry that's going to post in a couple of hours.

[hpfangirl71.livejournal.com]

I haven't been around in awhile cuz of off & on personal and computer issues. Working from a cell phone now which is a pain but I'd love to write more and this was always a good place for ideas. Either schedule is fine by me and I'm happy to hear about the AO3 cross post. My name there is same as here, hpfangirl71. I'll try to help in getting my submissions properly tagged in the community!!