Subject: That sounds pretty familiar.
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Posted on: 2019-10-08 20:04:00 UTC

I remember some comments back during the previous chat (what was that, the IRC?) that people weren't coming to it for the PPC - they were coming because that was where their friends were.

Which would drive me batty if I were on there, but... I'm not. ;) Noncanonical RP is an old tradition of fandom communities - heck, we do it all the time on the Board, and the one thing I remember from the first chat was a silly LotR RP.

The trouble with 'how do you make it a writing community' is that the answer is 'get a lot of people engaged', and we don't have that. I'm usually not engaged enough to get involved with writing stuff, as you might remember from the prompts. So what we get is one person, or two people, trying to organise something, pushing it for a few weeks, and then giving up because barely anyone replies.

Which would be less of an issue if there were more people around, because if one in 10 reply, then it matters whether you have 20 or 100. But... the only ways we've historically gained large influxes of new members are 1) being posted on a big archive (TVTropes), or 2) someone writing a whole lot of missions on one of the archives.

Which means you need someone with the time to write missions like there's no tomorrow. Unfortunately, all the people who've done that in the past got old and busy, and we don't have any super enthusiastic writers in the current crop of young (usually school or uni-aged) PPCers. I can tell, because if we did... they'd be posting missions like there's no tomorrow. ^_~

One idea I floated a while back (like... five years) was a Welcome to the PPC series: old missions posted to FFn & AO3 for the first time, under a single title, to try and draw in readers. I have five missions that were proffered at the time filed away; I could probably chuck in one of mine to go with them. If we (I) posted one per week, that would give us, uh, a month and a half of the PPC being a visible part of the fan community.

Which ain't much. But we could work on it.

hS

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