Mod Post: The Future Of The Community

[rosefyre]

Okay, I know that title is a little scary, but first things first:

Congratulations to everyone who completed Myshuno! and/or blackout this fall! We will be posting a special reading day sometime this coming weekend.

Okay, on to the future of the community.

Basically, things have changed a lot in the sims community since smoothiesims and themorganlegacy started sim_spiration back in

Comments

[peasant007]

Posting the prompts once a week instead of daily is probably the biggest reason why people don't respond to them. People forget about them. I know I did.

[regacylady]

I 100% agree with you here, but unfortunately we weren't getting enough prompts to do them every day. We probably should have done something different at the time, but oh well. :/

[fuzzy_spork]

You could have put all the old prompts into a spread sheet and randomized them every day. A prompt that someone wasn't inspired by when it was first posted, might get an idea from it a year later. :P Or you could have had an online bot do that for you. Or you COULD have gotten owls to deliver the prompts to everyone! WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT?!

[rosefyre]

Sorry, the post office was all out of owls when I stopped by the other day. :(

[penguingirl03]

Dropping the prompts seems fair to me. I definitely want to see the big events continue though (even though my participation was down the past couple of years). I finally have some real life free time and might actually be able to meet my goals for those challenges this year!

Let me know if you need help running things.

[rosefyre]

Yeah, the big events aren't going to disappear, though I'm sure they'll never stop evolving entirely.

And I know I'll keep you in mind for helping if we need more.

[fuzzy_spork]

I find the shift to Tumblr... strange. The interface is not meant for the kind of blogging we've been using LJ for, and there's a tight word limit on comments (such as they are). But I think if you want to get more people involved, SimSpiration should have a Tumblr account, too. But then that would require more time on someone's part to simul-post events there as well. Maybe a seasoned Tumblr user would volunteer to mod that end. To me that seems like the logical place for daily prompts or reminders. BUT, you know, more work. :P

Anyway, the weekly prompts aren't something I usually have any inspiration for, anyway, especially if I'm not actively writing when they are posted. :P I love the big events though! I hope those stay. Maybe you could get a couple more people involved as mods and that way the responsibility of running the events could be spread out more.

[rosefyre]

Yeah, I do not understand Tumblr at all. I guess it's easier to upload pictures? I dunno, you can't get real responses.

And yeah, I'm not learning Tumblr for this, I just have no motivation to do so. If someone wanted to make a simspiration Tumblr and link, I don't see any reason to object, but for me? Not worth it.

[smoothiesims]

Maybe we should also have a Twitter. I really don't like Tumblr (although I understand the appeal for some people) and I know some people don't like/use Twitter either, but a lot of people DO, and I've been Tweeting event reminders and chapter updates.

[rosefyre]

It's not a bad suggestion, but again, I'm not going to be the person running it.

[regacylady]

About damn time, honestly.

(And I've already put a reminder in my phone for special reading day.)

[rosefyre]

(Reminders are good! That one's on your or Marina, you two can figure it out, since I'm out of town and won't be able to deal with posting this weekend.)

[smoothiesims]

I didn't know you were planning on doing this - thank you :D

[leilia]

I'm not surprised by this, honestly.

I will say that the reason I don't participate in Poker Face is that it is still essentially Go Fish which I wasn't fond of. Also I think a lot of us really don't like writing too far outside of our story-verse into too AU.

Have you considered re-vamping Poker Face to be more of a Texas Hold 'Em style with two hole cards and then 5 community prompts/styles/tropes. And people need to write 5 fics to win.

Also rather than writing styles like 1st person or 2nd person, what about using tropes? I mean everyone likes tropes.

(Putting this out there because I have been talking about this with Rose)

[rosefyre]

We're going to have to talk about Poker Face - I do think it went better this year than last, but there's always room for improvement. I do like the Texas Hold 'Em idea for sure!

[smoothiesims]

Yeah, Poker Face was intentionally a more user-friendly version of Go Fish, but there's always room to revise. There's time to think about it!