Why should anyone go through the trouble of making a start-up kit for new members? From what I've read in the Introductions, most "new members" have actually been guests or lurkers (myself included) before taking the plunge. A "starter kit"? That's like going into a bookstore/library, and not expecting the new visitors to read the signs telling them what section they're in.

There's no need for a DLP bible; just read everything that's stickied. Stop encouraging laziness and preventing potential lolz.

 

The Admins have always been very patient with my newbie mistakes - and I've made A Lot of them. God knows how many questions I've asked about obvious things, and no one ever flames me for being an idiot.

 

Same here; no matter what side you look at the issue from, a DLP Bible is largely unnecessary.

 

Still better than not asking, and doing th obvious things wrong.

 

I refer to what I said in the "Rash of Necro Postings" thread. I believe that we should have, at the very least, a message that says "I agree not to necro-post on this forum unless I have something useful to say," kind of like the "general rules" thing that we agree to when we log in. It'd be good imo to have a separate page like that with some sort of message about necro-posting (in huge letters and crazy colors).

 

^ Oh come on, if people don't read the rules why would they read another rules page?

The only people who'd read the no-necromancy message would be those who wouldn't necro in the first place.

 

Instead of bothering with a list of an authors Top Ten or a DLP Best list just use the Favorite Stories section of an Author Profile?

 

The problem with DLP is that there are a lot of people with very strong, and very varied opinions of what could be called a good story. As such a best of the best list would really be next to impossible to implement.

Here is another suggestion though. Why not implement a tagging system. Tags could be short descriptions, submitted by members, such as "killfest", "cannon recap", "4th year AU" or even "40k+ words" and so on. The next step would be to make these tags visible when browsing the library so that people could make informed decisions when selecting a story.

With such a system, a person who likes or dislikes a certain element of a story they just read can tag it appropriately. Subsequently when another person is looking for a story to read, he could see the new tag and decide whether to look closer or avoid the story entirely. As an added bonus, this would help resolve or at least mitigate issues that arise with archiving older stories that have fallen out of favor with a fraction of the population. Instead of just passing over them due to a possible low rating, newer users can still get some insight into the story without reading into it.

This is not to be confused with the normal description that usually comprises the body of the story post, such as genre, pairings, and summary. Instead the info would go more in depth into the actual content.

Of course the devil's in the details, so such a project would need some very careful consideration and planning to prevent abuse, and to keep up with changes in the story. That said it would be an amazingly nice feature to have, and would aid new members immensely.

 

Not a bad idea. Though the tags would have to be approved by an admin or something to prevent spamming and over-tagging.

 

You are correct of course. Abuse and spam are the two major concerns that would plague such a system. Unfortunately relying on admins to validate tags would not only be unrealistic, but would also defeat the purpose. Admins have enough on their plate as it is, asking them to take on extra work, especially at such a high volume, would be a surefire way to get the idea shot down. Even if that was not the case, verification would impose delays of god knows how long into the tagging process, which would make the entire thing rather pointless.

My rough approximation of the system would work on several levels. First, tagging would require membership and a minimum post requirement. This would prevent all but the most dedicated from trying to abuse the system just for fun. Second, tags would need to be annotated with member names, such that all of the tags a member entered could be removed at once. Finally, tagging rights would need to removable, so that once a person has been found to be incapable of tagging rationally, their rights to tag could be disabled. This should really take care of the rest of the obvious spammers.

The problem of over-tagging is harder to address though. Ideally we'd want the tags to appear as quickly as possible, therefore a voting system for tags would do us no good. To some degree we could depend on the members of DLP to be a bit more mature. Otherwise we could give members the ability to delete tags as well as create them. True, this could lead to tag wars on the most contested stories, which would in turn need admin intervention, but for the most part the level of tagging would reach a point of equilibrium. Alternatively, we could impose an upper bound on the number of daily creations and deletions, which would placate all but the most fanatical.

 

Hopefully nothing where Harry experiences corporal punishment at the hands of Severus Snape. I think I saw at least two of those in the summary line in the "40, 000" word category on FF.Net yesterday.

 

Love the name, Harry

 

Why did he receive the banstick?

 

Multiple accounts I think. One of them was Tao.