Mod Post : Themes And Contributions

[sea_thoughts]

There's been a noticeable drop in contributions to the community this year. :( seniumboy and I have been discussing on how to improve this and I thought a poll might prove helpful.

Poll What would inspire you to write more/contribute more?

If you have any other ideas, please feel free to put them in the comments.

Oh, and please VOTE for January 2010. We need to catch up. :)

Comments

[covenmouse]

Mmm... it's not so much that the daily themes that don't interest me, it's usually the monthly theme. For instance, I liked PGSM but I have zero desire to write for it. We did starlights, and I loathe the starlights, therefore I'm not going to write for them. /shrugs/ I know y'all tend to pick by popular opinion, and I don't find fault with that, it's just how it goes.

Then there's the whole nominations/voting thing... the issue I've always had with that is that I have to fill out the entire damn thing. When you have a lot of writers, that's a lot of entries to go back and read. I don't have any problem doing this for other, similar communities, because their voting is weekly for a single prompt, not an entire two months worth of submissions.

Even when it's just down to the voting round, there are times when I don't like any of the entries for a particular prompt, or I'm just plain antagonistic to what is being written (such as Starlights) and therefore don't feel qualified to judge

[lovelylytton]

Like Covenmouse, I also didn't write much for the last months because the monthly themes weren't exactly my cup of tea. I'm not too big on the Starlights, have never seen PGSM and none of my main ships is slash/femmeslash.
I do love the daily themes though, and I think you have a wonderful array of prompts, so if I like the monthly theme, the daily ones tend to inspire me to write. :)

To be honest, the nomination and voting process can feel a bit tedious at times, and I did wonder once or twice if we couldn't just vote directly from a list of all entries written within the deadline rather than nominating some beforehand and then doing the voting afterwards.

[dark_branwen]

To be honest, the nomination and voting process can feel a bit tedious at times, and I did wonder once or twice if we couldn't just vote directly from a list of all entries written within the deadline rather than nominating some beforehand and then doing the voting afterwards.

Ooh, I like this idea! The main reason why there were nominations before was because we used to have a much larger volume of stories being turned in, but since there aren't as many now, it might make more sense to switch to this format.

[jpendizzle]

I agree with this. I loathe nominating.

Except if this place is ever booming again we will have problems on voting for millions of stories and that would be even more tedious.

There has to be some way to vote that's not annoying...like take each day and pick the winner/the best, and they move on to the final round?

Or we can just stop voting all together...or get like a 5 person panel to do the whole voting thing? I would be on a panel if I didn't have to nominate and such because well, it is kind of easy for me to gauge stories since I do the master lists. =P Orrrr I don't know.

[lovelylytton]

I wouldn't mind having a voting panel if the people on it would switch bi-monthly so that everyone who wants to vote gets a chance to do so at some point.

On the whole though, I think I'd prefer voting myself IF we could somehow eliminate the nomination process beforehand.

[galaxylily]

For me personally I've had a really rough time of trying to write anything at all, and what I do manage doesn't usually end up in the community. This is partially because most of the monthly themes (especially this year) are ones that I just plain wouldn't write for and have no desire to read.(I have voted for themes, by the way.)
I agree with Covenmouse in that I think a good option would be to either alter the way we award people or in how we vote.

[sheankelor]

Okay... For me, it is just the muse has changed her focus. I have started working with a manga that I absolutely love as much as Sailor Moon. That makes it hard to write. I have found that I am a very tunnel focused person.

So... *sigh* I don't know when it will change, but I still enjoy writing for here.

I do like the the idea that lovelylytton put out for the voting. Maybe a poll that hides the results until all is said and done?

[laced_victorian]

I'm going to jump on board with some of the other comments and say that for me it's more the monthly theme that I lack interest in. I may be vanilla in this notion but I preferred the themes that were based on Character X or Pairing Y. I'd almost like to go back to the more simple themes that I find to be the 'heart' of Sailor Moon... maybe that's a personal phase I'm going through, but I am kinda in the mood for that nostalgic/classic old time fave of boy meets girl kind of deal.

I hope this isn't coming off as snooty or anything.. it's not that I don't like reading submissions in the other themes because I honestly do. I just seem to have boring writing preferences lol.

[laced_victorian]

Oh! In addition.. maybe we could do something like have a monthly theme poll? Like you guys throw out two or three themes and we all vote for what we want - that way you know there is a majority interest. If the others get a decent # of votes you could recycle those in later polls :)

A little extra work but it might make a difference!

[lovelylytton]

I'd very much like a bi-monthly theme poll. The mods could pre-select a number of themes (let's stick with three), then the community could vote which one they'd like to do most. I think this could lead to a higher number of entries.