You're a massive pussy hth.

 

Taure, you get more damned feedback than just about anybody else. For instance, I posted a new story and have about 10k words. I have three replies over the course of a week and a half. In that same time and fewer words you've gotten about a hundred. You, of all people, have no right to complaint about a lack of feedback.

 

He's not complaining about the quantity of feedback he gets, he doesn't like the quality.

And I think some people need to chill out a bit. He did the responsible thing and asked the mods if there could be a change in the WBA rules. Some post here reek of ad hominem; people should be careful with that. Nobody here won anything to be so judgmental.

Just let the mods decide.

 

Wrong. He literally said he hates that people lurk - i.e. that they read and don't review.

 

I feel like I've done a poor job explaining my position. Let me try again.

1. It's not about the feedback I have received in the Fawkes' Gift thread, which I am happy with.

2. The idea behind the WBA -- and this is already DLP policy, as shown through the fact that guests can't see the WBA -- is that it's not for people to read fics, it's for detailed betaing of fics prior to general publication. In the words of Sesc:

3. Guests are circumnavigating this by joining but then never having anything to do with the site again. They have user names, but they're still guests. Yes, some small number of them go on to become participating members of the site, and whatever solution is implemented will have to be mindful of that and try to preserve it, but this is a real problem. To give an idea of the scale of the issue, the Fawkes' Gift thread received 15,000 views in the last 5 days. That's a lot of "peeping toms".

4. Private groups are not an ideal solution. The unique quality of WBA, when it works as it should, is that it's semi-private: you can receive comments from a wider group than your close writing buddies, opening you up to new ideas, but it's still private enough that it feels like a closed group. When you proceed to post your completed, polished chapter to FF.Net or Patronus Charm you can feel secure that the polished version is the one 99% of people are reading.

5. Why do you care if people read the unpolished version? Well, imagine you wrote something for a DLP anthology. You made a first draft then spent many hours polishing it based on feedback to a final draft. Then, when the day comes and you receive your copy of the book: you open it to find that it's your first draft inside, not the final draft. You'd be pretty bummed. Not only were all those edits wasted work, people are now forming opinions of your work and ability on the basis of an inferior product.

Anyway, we've had a good discussion about this in IRC tonight. It's a complex issue and we have to be careful about making changes. But I think most writers would like the idea of an area that is less private than invite-only -- meaning you're getting opinions from outside your usual small circle of friends -- but still private enough to prevent the general masses from seeing the story-boarding process (that is, the mass release of spoilers). WBA has the potential to be that space.

 

I dunno man. At the end of the day, I want more people to see and respond to stories so I get real feedback. Any limiting of access limits the likelihood of that.

 

Taure, some of those are fair points, I suppose, but they still don't really address the reality, which is that without the non-established members, the WbA wouldn't really function at the moment. Of the first forty threads in the HP WbA at the moment, only nine of them have more than 100 posts. Three of those threads are your stories. One of them is Circular Reasoning, which has been going since 2007.

Not everyone can rely on the massive interest you get, particularly from older members.

 

So what do you propose? The 100 post limit is stupid at best and will lead only to spam. Members-only is as semi-private as it's going to get.

You don't want people who only join to read WbA, but you do want those that do the very same thing and comment. How are you going to differentiate between them?

The only way that would really work is a private group (or Google Doc) where people could apply. Everyone gets access at first, but if they never offer any feedback, you toss them out. But that'd be your job, not ours.

 

I think you guys are overly pessimistic about the possibility of creating a solution which avoids the problems you present (these problems were already anticipated in our IRC discussion).

For example, Syao suggested that there be various pre-set levels of WBA privacy which the thread-creator can choose from.

 

I do want the general membership to view it. What I don't want is the general public to view it. The membership criteria was a step taken to enforce that, but it doesn't work very well, because having an account isn't a very good indicator of being part of the DLP community.

Finding an indicator which is a good measure of being part of the community is the tricky part, because:

1. You don't want to stop growth of the community.
2. You don't want to exclude atypical members of the community who nonetheless contribute in some way.

Some suggestions that were made last night:

- An "active users" usergroup to which people are added/apply to gain access to WBA. Downsides: manual administration, difficulty of identifying which new members will contribute. Advantages: no programming necessary, intelligently selective.

- Post count block. Advantages: Definitely stops lurkers. Disadvantage: spam, might also catch low postcount members who do contribute occasionally, new members may be less likely to participate in the community without WBA there to gain their interest. The spam could be mitigated by not publishing the number of posts needed to see WBA, but realistically people would figure it out.

- A "post commitment" system whereby when you enter a WBA thread you have made a commitment to give feedback in a certain period of time. If you don't give feedback within that time, you lose access to the thread. To avoid spam, feedback posts could be rated by users (maybe using the thumbs up system) and if your feedback lacks a good rating then you lose access to the thread. To avoid losing potential DLP members, it could be done so the first page of WBA threads are immune to this -- everyone can see page one, but beyond that you have to contribute. Advantages: Stops lurkers but also lets in new users who want to participate, also stops established members who just enter WBA to get a sneak peek at fics. Disadvantages: A lot of programming work, dangerously close to a reputation system.

- "Thread creator controls access" system. Thread creator chooses a level of thread privacy from certain options: public, members-only, and then some other, higher privacy options (some of the above, perhaps, like the ability for OP to set a custom postcount block on WBA threads). Advantages: custom to the desires of the author. Disadvantages: depending on the higher privacy options they could be a lot of work to implement, plus whatever disadvantages the above privacy measures already have.


Anyway, those are just some ideas that were thrown around. These are practical issues: how to implement a solution, which I take it is a different discussion to if a solution is desired. Most people ITT have focused on the latter, but it seems to me that WBA management are more concerned with the former -- they already hold that the WBA is for betaing and thus should ideally have a level of privacy less than invite-only groups but greater than "anyone can view". The problem is finding an elegant solution which avoids heavy-handedness but also involves minimal work.

 

It already has. It's called "members only". If you want to implement anything beyond that, use a social group.

tl;dr: No.

 

Just to clarify: is this the official final word from DLP administration (in which case the discussion is pretty much done) or your personal opinion (in which case there is room for debate)?