Post Missions on newer writing platforms like Wattpad?

I feel kind of bad that my own activity has been so low of late; it's been pretty hectic the last few weeks. I hope to pick back up henceforth.

I am wildly amused to see people raising the same kind of points I've been raising since, uh... about 2005, just at the point where I've relaxed enough to not make them any more. This Is All The Chat's Fault was my rallying cry for many a year. (Is it true? Eh, I'unno. This whole conversation started because I asked how active the Discord was, and the impression I got was 'not very actually'.)

The Board has been slowing down over time. We peaked in 2008, which was a very active time, and have been trending downwards since. Check out the total post counts in the annual spreadsheets to see this in action. And it does feel very slow right now, I'm not going to lie. But ultimately, I think Nesh and Zing have it right - it's not that much slower, and it'll probably pick back up.

Of course, the only way for it to pick back up is for people to post more and write more. ^_^ We had an upsurge of both newbies and writing when Iximaz was young and energetic, which was because a) there were lots of PPC stories appearing on fanfic archives, and b) when they came looking, people found an active Board. It's like you said: bootstraps.

I've tried out a few methods of getting things to pick up speed here. The most fun was Driftwood, which (for the first six missions) was posted weekly on FF.net. Missions can be short and quick, so maybe someone who's got more time/energy could go back to that? I then segued into a more relaxed Wednesday Pluggage, where I tried to post a new piece of fiction once a week - not all long, but it meant there was something up there.

Then... well, there were the Friday Forums, where I posted news and fun stuff each Friday. That created an active thread each weekend, but I don't think it sparked much general activity (though I did get a quirky D&D comic strip out of the second version). I've also given myself challenges like 'reply to every thread', 'reply to everyone who replies to me', and 'make a new thread Monday, Wednesday, and Friday', but those burn out so quickly when people don't react to them.

I also created Plort... >:) The big difference between The Protectorate of Plort, Konti-Nyuum and the various other 'what if the PPC community was X?' efforts is that I didn't start with a story about myself: I started with a) a story of the community, and b) presents. ^_^ People get very excited if you offer to make something for them, and if that leads into RP and interaction, you have a Plort.

Looking back at what I've just written, I think my advice boils down to: give. If you want to see the PPC community thrive, put as much of yourself into it as you can spare. If you're lucky, people will respond in kind. (If you're not, then... prepare to feel pretty grim about the whole thing in a couple of weeks. Sorry. :-)

hS, rambling still

I can't speak for others, but let me tell you how I've used it:

-to go through badfics I already know I won't mission, but would like to share and boggle and rant at and analyze with other people joining in all of that. It's fun, it's interesting, it's writing critique--it's a slightly intellectual form of entertainment.

-to go through bits of badfics I am missioning, because I want to share a bit of it (without talking too much about the mission itself) and am a slow mission writer anyway. It also sometimes leads to new ideas for the mission itself, or the outcome--for instance, in one case I worked out that I was definitely rescuing a particular baby and another Boarder helped me name him.

-as a form of advertising. Much like a more in depth version of a badfic thread on the Board, going through a badfic in the channel brings it more thoroughly to others' attention, and sometimes (relatively often, tbh) results in someone deciding to claim it, or to claim it pending Permission. It doesn't happen with every fic, just as not every fic posted here gets claimed, but I've seen it happen a good few times.

So. While I'm still in favor of a bit more transferral of cool/interesting things from the Discord over to the Board (in the sense of making posts about it, not moving over--there was discussion of this a while back, some of it from me, though I'm not completely sure which keywords to search yet and can't do it right now anyway), I don't think it's bad that the Discord exists or that it should be limited or something. Encouragement to make more Board posts and to share more of the fun things from the Discord (remember, there are Boarders who aren't on there, or who only pop in once in a long while!) is one thing; however, I don't think it's taking anything away, really. There's been a form of chat lounge for a very long time; moreover, the idea that it's draining away the PPCness of the community...

Listen: I've been here since early 2013. Longer than some, not as long as others, yes, it's a bit of a yikes moment to see that mean it's been a while...I'm getting off track. My point is: when I became a Boarder, the Board was not purely a place for writing discussions! There were bits of current events, science posts, movies coming out, life event announcements that weren't all writing related, Gathering reports, silly posts about quizzes, silly posts about pretty much everything...

There were also, of course, all sorts of writing-related posts: writing questions, PPC-related questions, RP posts, writing challenges, the occasional writing workshop from PoorCynic, movie reviews, hypothetical questions, questions connected to fanfic writing, questions/threads about writing philosophy, PPC-specific threads like story announcements, beta requests, Permission requests, wiki questions, the various annual events (shipfest, badfic games, eventually Plort, a handful of others that are a little less annual), etc...

As far as I can tell, we still have a lot of that going. It's ebbed and flowed throughout the years--heck, I'm not just talking about 2013 here to begin with--but whenever something vanishes, at some point it's often brought up again as 'hey, we used to have this going and it was fun, how about we do it again?' and it gets restarted. Sure, we should absolutely get excited about the new Board and hopefully see it as a reason to post more, and, as mentioned, I'd be supportive of more posts about things from the Discord, but I don't think the essence of the community is anywhere near draining away. If anything, we've just been able to move some of what might once have been smaller random chatting/supportive discussions into somewhere with a larger audience! (Disclaimer: I was not in the IRC at its heyday, and, in fact, only went in once or twice and found almost no one there. It's very likely that it functioned pretty similarly; I wouldn't know. What I do know is that I see on the Discord similar sorts of discussions, whether serious or just chatting about shared interests or silly things, to ones I had in private or small group chats in earlier years. Mind you, if that is how the IRC functioned...congratulations! The Discord has worked out well as its successor!)

Also. Alllllso.

There's probably a lot more writing going on behind the scenes than is apparent. A lot of us are in some form of school; those who aren't have often entered the working world. Writing, editing, revising--it takes time. I have stories I've been working on for years, and I know I'm not the only one. Heck, even recent stories that have been written and finished within months--you haven't seen them yet because they're still in first draft or betaing stages! Believe me, there's a lot of slow writing or slow editing happening that isn't talked about constantly because one doesn't really want to give constant updates on how slowly something is happening (or to get people excited over and over about something that likely won't be done for quite a while yet).

Another writing behind the scenes point which is more personal but, who knows, potentially relatable to others: we change, develop, as we grow. For me, one thing I suddenly realized had changed was my writing style. It made it very hard to want to continue older stories, both PPC and not; it also, for a time, made it rather difficult to think up new ideas and have faith that they could go the distance. I'm not sure how much of a drop that caused in my PPC writing, though I do think that point coincides with a time when I kept starting, stopping, and completely redoing a small set of PPC ideas, so...yeah, I'm pretty sure it had an effect. I don't know if others here have experienced something like that, but given a lot of our non-teenage contingent seems to have joined as teens and now grown into mid-twenties or -thirties...well, it seems possible, anyway? Anyone's welcome to weigh in, should they wish to.

(Also, yeah, we've never really...done the advertising thing. That's okay. See...I can't check from this page, but Cassie, Neshomeh, or both have already said what bears saying on this topic, I think, so see their posts.)

It could be nice to have a compilation of recent missions, but...we have that. It's on the wiki! We could direct people there, along with TOS, but otherwise...well, it's right there on the sidebar of the front page :)

And finally: regarding AO3...yeah, I probably have more interludes to put up there. We'll see when I get there (and hm, a good number are co-written, so that's a brief discussion...). More important, I think, or at least equally so, is continuing to add publication and setting dates to story docs! And I need to rewrite Dawn's wiki page, though at least the story list is pretty much up to date...

Basically: many little projects. Many little RL projects, too. I'll get to them all eventually.

Anyway, those are my two (more like five) cents.

~Z

PS: Breathe, Neo, though presumably you have by now. It's good that you made the post--it's sweet that you're concerned, and a bit of good reflection/discussion/context about the Board's past seems to be coming out--but while there are probably some small changes that would be good to make, panicking is, fortunately, unnecessary.

PPS: A little anecdote regarding the vitality of the PPC:

When I found the Board in 2013, I'd already been reading PPC stories for years. I'd found them something like 6-7 years earlier, around the point I really got into reading and writing fanfiction, and had read...pretty much whatever was available around that point, as well as related stories like OFUM and Suedom. By 2013, I hadn't read them as recently, but still remembered them and the setting...and I was writing a Mary-Sue parody fic, and decided I'd like to swing by and try to find a surviving member or three (about all I thought would still be active) to ask for permission (yes, lowercase) to write in a couple of agents for an outtake.

I didn't find three people.

(I found roughly a hundred, and a pretty active community. I wound up joining because someone asked if I was planning to go for Permission, and I wasn't, but then I started thinking about it, and that was it, I had plotbunnies coming out my ears and started developing agents. Three months later, I was still skipping around excitedly because oldbies were talking to me a bit and then that became excited jumping because aaah, after probably a month or so of carefully editing my Permission request, I'd submitted it and was successful. And the rest is that it kind of took over my writing life, to a certain extent, etc, etc, my point is...right, that the PPC Board is a lot better at survival than one might expect. Even when it has to move!

Also, returnbies. People do come in and out a lot. It can take months or years, but people often pop up again if they didn't intend to leave forever.)

I highly doubt that the Discord's #goodfic channel is going to be detrimental to the PPC, and there's an important reason why: it takes a lot less effort to say "Hey, this thing is good, I think you should read it if you're in the fandom!" than it takes to take a badfic apart. The way things move in the Discord, people can spend a few hours riffing on a particular fic, and I can easily imagine writing a 30-page mission taking weeks to write, edit, and get beta-read before publishing.

Doing that kind of analysis on a goodfic is possible, but then it starts being less of a plug and more of a full review, which I think of as being in a different category. Plenty of people have done reviews of things on the Board before--Thoth has done a few, and I recall Nesh doing a bit of one for the last How to Train Your Dragon movie--but those reviews are generally meant to spark a conversation about that particular work or genre, not start or be part of a recommendation thread.

Not much to add to that, really. I've been around since 2003. To me, "the PPC is dying" is just one of those conversations that happens every so often on a somewhat cyclical basis. Seeing as the PPC hasn't died yet, I figure things will tick up again eventually—I'm not done yet, at least. As long as there are people who aren't done yet, the PPC will continue to exist. If there are people who want more enough to do more, that will happen, too. That's all anyone needs to do about it, really: be the change you want to see in the world PPC community. {= )

~Neshomeh, generally in favor of not panicking.

As I've only returned very recently from an absence of about five years (judging by the fact the last thing I seem to have been involved in was the 2014 Gathering), I can't say too much about the way the community works at present. However, to the best of my knowledge, the Board is not generally a quick-moving place and never has been. Sometimes with a big community event or a thread that sparks everyone's imagination things will explode for a little while, but as a general rule an average of one new thread a day was fairly active and busy back when I was a regular Boarder before.

The other point I want to mention is that the PPC has never seemed to be the sort of place that actively advertises itself, per se. People seem to stumble across it, or follow links that a friend of a friend of a friend told them about once in passing, or get a review from someone and come looking, etc. We don't need to actively recruit, because that's not what we're about. (I feel like it's more likely to draw unwanted negative attention and people who don't really get or care what we're about, and we've had plenty of that already.) We're just a bunch of people who enjoy good writing and poke good-natured fun at bad writing, and amble along enjoying the relatively peaceful, humorous and odd little community that's evolved here over the years.