Subject: I'm liking the new FAQ for other people
Author:
Posted on: 2018-04-15 16:03:00 UTC
I recommend that this topic be re-raised at the top of the Board, since this was buried in a serious discussion and a lot of folks might not have seen it before.
I can try to contribute to these once real life quiets down a bit.
- Tomash
Remember when I said the PPC should have a YouTube channel, or that we should start making PPC animations and post them on YouTube?
Even though that idea didn't have much effect and didn't spread around much (fortunately), I'm starting to think that one over a little.
YouTube is huge, and somewhere out there could be the person who wrote the badfic, or one of their friends, or an equally bad author who wants to stand up for the person, or someone who likes niceness culture, or something like that. That could be dangerous. We could get a flood of demands from these people. That would be bad.
So I figure that that's a bad idea and it shouldn't be done, or at least should be limited to interludes, joke fics we write, sporkings of our own stuff (old/joke fics), and other stuff that happens here that doesn't have to do with anything any outsider wrote.
But may I ask y'all this: What is your stance on the PPC and Internet publicity? How much should we broadcast ourselves on the Internet and in real life (likely answer: not much), and/or how much should we attempt to gain new members (likely answer: also not much)?
Not that what we're doing now (just being where we are and letting ourselves be found) is bad, in fact, it's pretty good, and as of late, the only banworthy newbies showing up have all been zdimensia destroying yet another username before anyone else can use it. (I may be wrong on that one, but don't correct me, or else this thread will be thrown off-topic, I just know it.) However, I like to take things to various next levels if I can, and I have already made several tries at doing so on Scratch (with varying degrees of success), so if there's any new ideas regarding these things, I'd love to hear them.
Can't wait to hear your thoughts on this!
-Twistey
I've said this before (the topic came up years back and kind of dropped), so I'll just say briefly:
My worry in having too much publicity is that we'll attract trolls, or other people who want to attack us in some way. I think we're at a good place "enrollment"-wise, and don't need to stick our necks out towards the internet at large.
—doctorlit, boiling pasta
The PPC always struck me as a community where its smallness and tightness was one of its most important parts. At least, to the extent that if we started publicising it, attracting heaps of people, we'd need to change a lot about it to make it work, and, well, that theoretical community is just very different from what we have now, ay?
Need to change the site, change how we deal with issues that pop up (probably a bit harder voting for such things and being all loosey-goosey with it if you've got a thousand people spattering out their thoughts!), maybe even change the permission system, and so on and so forth.
I mean, I dunno, I'm sure it'd still be a nice enough place, but I quite like it as is, too, ay? And we're hardly in danger of running out of newbies or such.
And, yeah, trolls, attacks, so on so forth. There'll certainly be a lot more kookiness with new people, for sure.
With the big influx of people from TVTropes, we saw a huge shift in the community away from actual fanfic writers. We had pretty much this discussion back then, too. And yep, we had to change the Constitution, and the Permission process (the old style is a lot harder when you can't just look at someone's FF.net profile!), we went through years of everyone being constantly told to put things on pre-existing threads... oh, it's been a wild time.
In conclusion, in line with this viewpoint, I propose that we kick out everyone who's joined the PPC since 2010, and get back to the proper old community we had before we got all publicised. Who's with me? :D :D :D
-- the point I'm making is, yes, new people bring changes. Some of those changes are bad (we're a writing community with a steadily declining proportion of writers). Some of them are good (the Constitution is better now, and still improving). Some of them depend entirely on your point of view (personally I would love it if everyone was still an LotR fan). But without them, the community fades, and shrinks, and slows.
In January 2015, the PPC Board received approximately 1243 posts. In 2016, 1726. Last year, 2017, we saw 812. And this year we're down to 598.
... back in a minute.
Right, I've just gone and graphed this. The early numbers are estimates, extrapolated up from the nearest page of subject lines preserved in the archives, but this is how it looks:
2018 is literally the quietest year for the PPC Board since we were founded. In '04 and '05, I estimate we had well over 2500 posts in a month. Now, we can't even crack 600.
Tell me again how we're not running out of newbies?
hS
is that the PPC isn't where the fandom is anymore.
Back in the day, from what I can tell, a bunch of PPC stuff was on Livejournal, which is where a lot of fandom people were (and also FFnet before that). This meant that you could start in typical fandom spaces and find the PPC (maybe you'd need to stumble on something, but it wouldn't be particularly unlikely).
However, fandom's moved to other places, like, say, AO3 and Tumblr, and there's not a PPC presence anywhere near there. We're hiding in our corner of the Internet, and there are probably a lot of people who would join ... if they knew we existed.
I'm not sure what can be done here, since I don't interact too much with fandoms, but that sounds like something we should think about. Because it's hard to sustain a community no one knows about other than the members.
(also, wrt those stats - it's only April this year, and did you pull 2017 numbers from the archives?)
- Tomash
This thread is all about how we shouldn't make ourselves known, how we should stay holed up in our little corner. Which I'm against, if my post didn't make it clear. :)
I still have filed away a project to put some classic PPC missions up on FFn, as a 'Welcome to the PPC' introduction project. I also made sure to post the Driftwood series on FFn, which brought in at least a few people; I think Ix had missions up there, too.
So far as I know no-one's posted PPC stuff to AO3; it bears looking into. I'm skimming their FAQs and can't find anything that would exclude the PPC, though missions would definitely need to cite their original. (They in fact specifically allow transformative works of other fanfic.) --in fact, checking, Zingenmir posted a few things there, and AO3 has actually auto-archived TOS. So I may cross-post Driftwood at least if I get the time; could be worth a shot.
Other points: the PPC was never really on LJ. We had a community that basically existed to collect people's personal journals, and another that was to collect in-character agent journals, but we didn't interact with the wider community. We've always been an insular lot. ^_^
And yes, it's only April - which is why I made sure to point out that I was comparing January-to-January across the dataset. :)
hS
I can post more, actually, especially if people I've cowritten with are okay with it. I've also moved the stuff I posted on LJ to Dreamwidth, which is at least where Das Sporking is now, so maybe that counts as a bit of the community...?
Lily Winterwood was also posting missions and Multiverse Monitor articles (among other things) on Tumblr, which seems to have at some point actually gained a fic-writing community or seven; while I don't believe she's currently doing any PPC writing, the old stories are still up and she mentions the PPC from time to time.
I always kind of associated LJ with the PPC--the older PPC, from pre-2010, that I grew up reading (yes, you can feel old now. Sorry). That's why I originally set up there: a bit of nostalgia and continuation of tradition, and, well, why not? There were quite a few people who posted missions there or on Dreamwidth, from what I remember both of that time and of the immense amount of reading I did beginning in 2013 when I became a Boarder.
I...have lost track of my point a little, but hopefully this makes sense regardless. And yeah, as mentioned, I'm game to post some more to AO3--I was using it as a sort of backup, as well as a kind of 'well, why not?' and then kind of forgot about actually posting things on there. It's been busy.
~Z
PS: Speaking of which...hS, a whole bunch of us, at varying times, began university degrees and reached the last couple years of them. That might also impact the posting rates; I definitely know there were times when I barely even checked the Board for months, and certainly wasn't posting, because of that. It was just too much to balance--this was mainly at the time I was doing two degrees, I think, and was generally just very stressed out.
PPS: I remember that filed away project! Or at least, it sounds very familiar. Also still sounds like something of a good idea.
And only to the fanfic and social media sites that have a bigger percentage of mature people. That looks like it should sorta work...?
Any further ideas or criticism of the above?
-Twistey
Wouln't the existence of the Discord have an effect on our number of Board posts?
But so did the existence of the IRC, which my research says was created in 2007 and lasted until about 2015. Its foundation may have led to the massive drop-off in '07-'08, and its closure may have caused the spike in '16, but it doesn't explain the gradual increase between those years.
We also had a Bravenet chatroom roughly '03-'06, during the busiest time on the Board. The PPC has pretty much always had a chatroom bobbing about somewhere.
hS
I was under the impression that we are still getting a steady stream of newbies
Looking back, we have White on March 25th who hasn't posted outside their intro thread; Mythcreant on March 23rd who was Zdimensia; HeraldicBanner on March 20th who hasn't posted outside their intro thread; you have to go back to March 3rd - over a month ago - to find a newbie (classicfilmfan) who actually kept posting.
One new person per month comes to 12 per year. That's... not exactly a lot.
hS
I've noticed that, over the years, we tend to hover around 50 people if you count "willing to fill out the census") and 20-30 people if you count as "could be corralled in for a ban vote"/"posts regularly (in the Board or Discord)"/...
People also tend to leave either near-immediately (a lot of those newbies you mentioned, for example) or after several years (because of real life starting to hit their time harder or sometimes because of Drama).
So, abusing some terms a bit, the community membership pipeline is Newbie -> Middlebie -> Oldbie.
If there's been a noticable drop in how many people are entering the pipeline (showing up and posting), that's something we should worry about.
If we're having trouble with conversion to Middlebie (that is, getting folks to stick around for more than a week or two), that's also a problem, but a distinct one.
Come to think of it, do you have Permission Requests by year? That could help point to anything like that happening.
Middlebie to Oldbie conversion is ... not something we can exert much control over, I think, except by doing fewer things that cause folks to storm off in a huff, which we've been working on for the past year.
So, at the very least, what we want is a small stream of incoming Middlebies (using the term loosely) to replace the ones we lose to external stuff.
It's not clear that we've been shrinking. Going to look at a September 2011 seems to about the same number of distinct people posting, just that a lot of the names are different. Maybe we're a bit smaller ... but then again, the Discord is a thing (and so was the IRC, whose logs I don't have, so its hard to compare).
So, the question is, are we looking like we're going to shrink?
I don't quite know at the moment, because I'm not in a position to run more stats.
- Tomash
There are 43 people who've made more that one post on the front page (if we ignore Deadpool, a Mary Sue, and Mythcreant), while only 13 people (again, ignoring Deadpool and Mythcreant) have more than 10 posts (8 of those 13 have over 25 posts). There's also (if various single-use names are discounted) 8 people who have one post on the front page.
So it looks like the Board is made of a bunch of folks who wander by occasionally and don't post too often. That doesn't look too good as far as engagement goes.
(I'd do some stats on the Discord, but it seems a lot harder to do stats on.)
- Tomash
I'm specifically concerned because I'm bored - because the Front Page is currently nearly a month long, so even assuming I'm interested in half of the threads that go up, that means I can easily go a week without anything interesting appearing.
Given that the PPC Board is a place I go to find an interesting discussion to get involved with, yeah, I'm concerned.
You asked about Permission, and yes, that is also way down. Here's my spreadsheet, which I previously updated in May '17. I've now added all 6 requests we've had since then, none of them being from this year.
I would also like to point out that 'storm off in a huff' is hardly an appropriate way to describe how hurt various long-term members of this community have been by various events of the last few years.
hS
when I've bothered to look, the span of thread post dates on the front page of the Board has usually been around two and a half to three weeks (it's currently at around three). There were times it dipped down to nearly a month, which got me concerned, but I didn't really say anything because I thought it was just me going "Are we dying?". And it's now not entirely clear that we're not.
It looks like several of us are concerned that the PPC is withering away, and so it's good we're saying it and trying to have a discussion about what to do about it.
It's also good that 61516 is participating in this thread.
(That was a poor choice of words, and I apologize.)
- Tomash
This is purely anecdotal evidence on my part, but this is how it goes for me:
>Post on the Board
>>Get little or no response
>>>Get discouraged
>>>>Not participate in discussion because why bother anymore?
People just don't really respond to stuff anymore, and that creates a sort of mentality where it's like, "Well, if nobody's going to respond, I'm not going to post" and then nobody posts so there's nothing to respond to.
(Yes, I'm still unreasonably salty about my missions going from ten responses full of feedback to... one, after a week of silence.)
(Oh, this is probably a good point to mention that Scapegrace recently pointed me at your 'Overabundance of Snrf' mission, which I'd not read before; I was actually skimming for information, but what I focussed enough to read looked good! If I have time and/or memory to do so, I'll probably go back and actually read it.)
I'm with you on the lack of responses to stories; I try to reply to everything I read, but I, uh... don't read much. :-/ But yes, people, it's very disheartening as a writer to get no response to your stories - it feels like no-one's reading even if they actually are!
The big issue with this issue is that it doesn't go away unless lots of people try to counter it at once. I've tried at least four projects to get more people posting by posting more myself (the Friday Forums were the most recent); it doesn't work when it's only one person making that effort. The reason the Friday Forums ended was that we were down to a couple of people replying, and no-one responding to them.
But the more people do their best to post more, the easier it is for everyone - because more posts means more that any given 'you' will want to reply to.
Right, I have work to do, and a game thread to continue - and probably a mission (or two?) to read. And two hours to do it all in. Up, up and away!
hS
I know I made a serious effort on "review more" and "post more" initiatives, but then just about no one else took me up on it, and so my attempts to jump-start the place fizzled out.
Also, Ix and Patsy, sorry about not getting around to your missions. Things have been busy for me the last week or two.
- Tomash
For instance, I have been dreaming about making some sort of "PPC Agent Maker" and posting it on dA or something, as a way to attract newbies. I also almost considered starting a PPC-"brand" writing clinic on Scratch, but then again, Scratch is a wretched hive of immature teenagers and OC justice warriors. What I mean is, would some "advertising" for the PPC help us or hurt us, or in what situations would it do each?
Also, about people's motives for dropping off of newbies, not saying we should change the Permission time-frames, but could it be that part of why people drop off is because they have to wait a while before asking for Permission and writing PPC stories (which they came here for) and they don't see anything they find interesting until then? I suggest that maybe to help that, we make a more visible page on the wiki and/or link in the Board description about all the fun things we do here that don't require/aren't about Permission and stuff? Maybe then we can encourage them to have some fun while they wait.
-Twistey
I am a firm believer in the principle that the best way to attract new people is by having them read our stuff (though the last census shows that fully half of our membership came in through TVTropes, which is kind of the opposite). With that in mind, my number one way to draw more people in would be for those of us who are still writing missions to post them where they can be found! For me, that means Fanfiction.net, but AO3 is also under discussion. If someone has a broadly-read fandom blog (as Lily Winterwood did), that's also a fine place.
hS current status: I have a mission on the verge of posting, which will go up on FFn. I'm also looking to finally carry out the 'Welcome to the PPC' project, posting several classic missions there, and potentially crossposting to AO3.
Second up, one thing that sets the PPC apart from other Suvian hunters is that we love concrit. So... how often do we give it? If you read a fanfic that needs work - or is just plain bad - why not review it and offer the author advice on what the problems are and how to improve? And if there happens to be a PPC mission which showcases the same sort of issue, why not link to it? Obviously you'd need to reread the mission first (oh, the horror!) to make sure it's actually going to help them, not offend them - but aren't we a community of readers?
hS current status: I posted the 'Kaitlyn's Concrit' section of my Driftwood missions as a review for each author. I don't think I referenced the PPC, though.
Thirdly, looking more at retaining new members now... post more! The PPC Board used to be bustling with new threads, to the point where they kept dropping off before we were done with them. Now? Now there's nearly a month's material on the Front Page. Where are the badfic discussions (discussions, not just 'here's a link bye')? Where are the debates over canon minutae? Where are the ridiculously overthought questions about PPC trivia? Where are the games, the serious discussions, the ficlets and missions and all the good stuff?
Well... they're there, obviously. But there's many fewer of them.
hS current status: Posted a game! Don't post about canon much because it feels like no-one's interested in the ones I am.
And, fourth and finally: look for your own answers. ;) If you care about the PPC community continuing, then don't just expect a handful of Oldbies to carry it on our shoulders. That just results in very tired Oldbies.
hS current status: Not too tired right now.
hS
The formatting options are better there than on FF.n. For instance, you can post stories as part of a series, which suits a PPC spin-off better than making each mission a chapter in one story, IMO.
... I wonder if I can label a story as part of multiple series. I don't think so, but that would solve my problem of what to do with "Gestalt Therapy," since it's not exactly part of the RC 1110 series, but also really is. I'unno.
What's mainly holding me back is a) it's work, and b) I dunno how I feel about opening myself/us up to the sort of complaining the early PPC got, which prompted the creation of the FAQ For Other People. (Which still does need an overhaul, gah, why is there never enough time for anything anymore.) I do think the AO3 Terms of Service allow for missions, so there probably isn't a high risk of getting kicked off, but that also figures in a bit.
~Neshomeh
A while back (2015 or so) I came up with an outline for how to fix up our moderately terrible FAQ situation. I think you were involved, Nesh.
I think this is a good time to revisit that. This is the plan I concocted; so far, it's mostly just placeholders and empty spaces.
PPC FAQ Recalibration
1. FAQ: For Newbies (partially-filled draft)
-This combines most of the old FAQ: For Newbies, FAQ: The Board (which has been removed), and pieces of the Guide to the PPC (also removed). It's actually mostly complete - the main missing pieces are the introductory questions ('What's the PPC?') and a section on the Discord.
2. FAQ: For Other People (empty outline)
-It's no secret that I hate our current FAQ: For Other People. This one aims to actually provide helpful answers for questions like 'What's a Mary-Sue?', rather than just ranting at people who don't like us. I've outlined what I think are the questions that need answering, but haven't written any answers yet.
3. FAQ: On Permission (current FAQ)
-This one doesn't need changing! It's been repeatedly tweaked to try and give the best answers it can. It's not perfect, but it holds up a darnsight better than the four named so far.
4. A trilogy on mission-writing and posting: the Slash-Sporking Guide (unchanged), Posting New Missions (unchanged), and Mission Writing Guide (needs expansion and eventual revamp).
-Initially, the Guide will need to accommodate mission-related information from the old Newbies FAQ. Ultimately, it would be great if someone revamped it into a proper guide like the slash-sporking one.
If anyone is looking for a way to help the PPC community, working on the first two drafts is an excellent place to start! If we can get decent FAQs put together and linked on the Board and Wiki, then new people will have a good chance of understanding what's going on - and PPCers will have an excellent resource for explaining what badfic is and why it's a problem.
hS
I recommend that this topic be re-raised at the top of the Board, since this was buried in a serious discussion and a lot of folks might not have seen it before.
I can try to contribute to these once real life quiets down a bit.
- Tomash
I would say that all of these are significant improvements, but I want to specifically point to the new FAQ: For Other People. That needs to be finished and used as a replacment for our current one ASAP, and I'll do my best to help it on its way if I can.
Yes, there is a reason. That reason is that when I was a several-years-younger lad, and I first stumbled across the PPC, the idea caught my imagination. I thought it was great and amazing and I read TOS and later Tales From DoGA, and I loved it, and I wanted to join.
But I was young, and insecure, and I had never written fanfiction in my life. I wound up not joining because I was afraid of how the community might react to me, or whether I'd be made fun of or chased away because I wasn't experienced enough. Fears I would later discover were ill-founded when I did join.
The original FAQ: For Other People was instrumental in creating those fears. It make the PPC seem like a place to be afraid of, and a group that you had to be an experienced writer to interact with.
In summary, that FAQ almost caused me to never meet you guys and lead me to fear you. And I kinda doubt I'm the only potential newbie who might be scared off by something like that.
So if I had my say, the original FAQ: For Other People would be burned around a celebratory bonfire while we all caroused and drank and laughed and talked. And maybe afterwords we could find something Rude to do with the ashes.
...some of you may remember how I visited-then-realized-I'd-joined the Board thinking you were a ruthless group of critics I could "sic on" a badficcer friend when she didn't listen to anything I said about her work. The FAQ: For Other People did sort of give me that impression.
While I did sort of take a little immature happiness at the brutal snark of the original FAQ: For Other People (as I myself sometimes need to be restrained on my critiques of things), I do believe that this is definitely going to have better effects on our relations with outsiders and opponents, how people perceive us, our membership, and all that jazz.
As I've said... two times before? I like y'all, y'all force me to be mature. And I think it's a lot better that the FAQ matches that now.
-Twistey
All right, I reckon I should help. Think I'll start with some definitions. *cracks knuckles*
BTW, I think we should probably keep it third-person so we don't get multiple "I"s running around. That could be confusing. {= )
~Neshomeh
Are you wanting input/drafts edited into those draft pages, or here on the Board?
—doctorlit, wanting to help if he can, but feeling inadequate
They're drafts, after all - if people think there's a problem with what someone writes, they can always change it!
hS
I define a Mary Sue as a character that exists to gratify the author, and does so in a way that detracts from the reading experience.
... the Wiki includes a nice big article on the term Mary Sue. It starts out with this definition:
A Mary Sue is a fictional character that achieves its goals in the story with minimal effort, out of proportion to what the audience would expect given the setting(s), culture(s), and other inhabitants of that universe. In order to accomplish this, a Mary Sue will have character traits heavily skewed in favor of outstanding attributes over significant flaws.
If you're volunteering to write the answer to the relevant FAQuestion, which is found in the 'What do you mean when you say...?' section (I suggest using a PC; mobiles are notoriously tricky about the wiki), I suggest starting out with a link to the article (there's code for 'See also' somewhere), and basing your answer on that.
hS
Decided not to use the site mechanism for crediting inspirations, though, since those show up on a whole separate section of your dashboard. Don't wanna give 'em THAT much credit.
Interestingly, all but two missions have at least one hit already, and none of the interludes have any. I assume some of these are PPCers who wandered over to poke around, but clearly no one is clicking through either series in order. {= / "The Smasher" and "The Girl and Her Dragon" are the two missions no one's clicked on yet, and the three with the most hits are "Diptych: 'Secret Agents' and 'Cosmic Love'" with 9 and "Harry Potter and the Dragonriders of Pern" and "Ring Child" each with 7.
~Neshomeh
I was very curious to see how it would go. Turns out, really well! Pasting into the Rich Text Editor makes the process fairly quick and painless. And, look, check out how much information from my site I'm able to cram into this thing, links and all:
https://archiveofourown.org/series/990105
It's beautiful. ^_^
And, like, check out the mission. You can indicate that your story is "inspired by" another work, right in the story-posting architecture. It's like it was designed for this.
And BTW, I'd suggest to anyone else doing this that they also include a mention that the spin-off is authorized by the PGs on the PPC Posting Board, so it's quite clear that is expected. Y'know, like all the OFUs back in the day would say "authorized by Miss Cam" or something to that effect. {= )
~Neshomeh
This is great! I've been on AO3 for so long that it feels like my reading home. Seeing PPC stories on there is a connection I hadn't realized I had been wishing for.
First video for the PPC channel is right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Tell me what you think.
Novastorme
Shouldn't we talk about this? You could be opening us up to terrible stuff!
-Twistey ;)
I'm curious, which song did you use in that? It was a pretty beautiful trailer.
The song is Mama, and is by a Ghanaian band called Dark Suburb, Scape put some of their music on Discord a little while back. Here's a few more of their pieces:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfYYUsA9VpE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL6CDFn2i3I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSA_sWGM44