Open Thread #6 - What type of open thread style do you prefer?

[sunlit_skycat]

Open from Sept 1 to Sept 14

Looking for community admin! Description of expected tasks and application process here.

Poll #29884

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

What type of open thread style do you prefer?

View Answers

One open thread with multiple premade subject categories via comments
2 (40.0%)

One open thread with no premade subject categories
2 (40.0%)

Multiple threads focused on a single subject each
1 (20.0%)

Comments

[sunlit_skycat]

Well, we're getting close to the end of Pale. How do you all feel?

I've been considering running a Pale fic event once the last epilogue is over. Light prompting based on one or several themes of choice, at the end everything is posted here and people look at what everyone else has done.

[drowninstylisticaudacity]

That sounds like a good idea. There are definitely going to be a bunch of plot hooks open (we can pretend that Plex won’t exist).

[sunlit_skycat]

One to two months, minimum 300 words feels like it should be reasonable.

Elsewhere fic on Dreamwidth

[sunlit_skycat]

In other places, people have mentioned interest in a community that can hold and discuss elsewhere fic for the Otherverse. Right now, the Tea Nook doesn't do that, because it has a narrow focus, and elsewhere fic is high volume enough that I do not feel comfortable taking on that workload as a single admin. (Currently looking for Tea Nook admin, details here.) However, I do have thoughts on how a hypothetical elsewhere fic community on DW could be organized, based on experience here.

First of all, an elsewhere fic community will probably have a lot of people interested in worldbuilding and powergenning. The recurring threads should be set up to hold that type of discussion. It might have overlap with the type of material created for Pactdice.

It may be worth allowing people to post speculative setting gens of how Practice works in a particular part of the world, with ways to mark whether other people should credit them back for use of specific elements, or can remix them into other things. That seems like the type of collaboration that would be very fulfilling to community members and need more moderation to avoid hurt feelings.

They'll want some type of tag structure to filter things that elsewhere readers and writers are interested in looking at, while keeping within the 1000 free/1500 paid/2000 premium paid maximum tags allowed on DW. Here in the Tea Nook, a good 58 tags are already taken with character tags alone, expected to increase as more material is added. This is why ships are sorted by gendered permutations instead of specific pairings, because otherwise the pairings tag list would balloon to the point of leaving no room for any other type of tag. There is also metadata that is used here which is required to state in text, like story rating or content warnings, but is not stated in searchable tags, because they are intended more to tell readers to exclude them from their reading pool than to include them in it.

Lastly, they'll need to figure out what to do with multichapter stories that are uploaded in chunks. Unlike Ao3, DW does not automatically generate chapter lists or the ability to see previous and next chapters. In the Tea Nook, the tag system is used, which is fine in the short term as long as different stories don't have the same name and the number of multichapter stories doesn't exceed the number of allowed tags.

There are other systems like the currently developing Ourchive that have more robust tagging systems, but it requires more technical knowhow to run, actual monetary investment for hosting, and currently needs a lot of UI improvements. It looks like it might have potential in several months, but I don't recommend it to anyone now.