The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

And it's not all what I'd choose to present to the wider public. We've changed rather a lot since 2002, and worked hard for that change, and I wouldn't want to put stuff out there that doesn't reflect the culture we have today.

See, IMO, part of our recruitment problem is that it's hard to find people with the right balance of snark and respect in their hearts. Back in the day, the balance was skewed more toward snark. Since then, in response to accusations of bullying and misogyny and such, we've made strides in being critical without being mean. It's a tough balance to strike for anyone, perhaps particularly for the younger, more active set. We ask for a lot of critical thinking as well as a sense of humor.

And there ARE people out there who can walk that line, and enjoy it. If we want to attract them, though, the stuff we choose to put out there has to reflect our current values as much as possible. It shouldn't be just anything, and it certainly can't be everything.

But, here's another issue: Is it okay to repost someone else's work like that? To my mind, preserving stuff in a privately maintained archive for our internal use is one thing, but putting it out on AO3 or whatever would be another.

(Anyway I'm way ahead of you all; I've been on AO3 since the last time we had this conversation, whenever that was.)

~Neshomeh

It's not like there's no-one in the high-school/university age bracket who would be interested (out of literally millions of people); and if there was any reason why social media or other internet trends would reduce that, you would think it would have already happened years ago; Facebook is... actually older than I am, apparently.

You're correct in that we've got two problems to deal with here, but I feel like good publicity (the second one) will help us with the first; newbies who expect the community to already be like that might help us push it in that direction, and it'll also help get existing members engaged again. There's nothing wrong with having a well-defined niche internal culture so long as you're able to reach lots of people who fit in that niche.

No idea how I feel about dragon romance, but I'll probably check it out.

We let Moffat do long-running arcs without adult supervision, and then we made him end them. We know what happens when Moffat ends a long-running arc. Look at Jekyll. That was a complete waste of everyone's time. Was anyone really surprised that the end of the Silence arc felt like it had been scrawled out on a napkin five minutes before filming finished?

Steven Moffat is the kind of writer who's great at middles. He can string people along and keep them interested like the best of them. Beginnings? They're hit or miss. Endings? He has never, ever written a good one for a long-form story. When he's writing for a one- or two-part story and has oversight in the process, the results are very good indeed - there was a reason we were all fine with him taking the reins from Uncle Rusty at first, and let's be honest it was mostly Blink and The Empty Child. But we let him take the reins and gave him not the merest hint of oversight, which is like being surprised at plunging into a ravine when you gave the hovercraft's controls to a penguin.

We've only ourselves to blame, really. We expected too much of his extremely limited skillset.

There are probably a reasonable number folks who'd want a space like what we're (hopefully (I do seriously hope)) wanting to be (topic-focused long-form-biased discussion on fandom and writing and poking fun at badfic).

Big problems we're facing though are:
1) That aspect of the PPC has really slowed down, as has been pointed out in this thread. So we sort of need to re-bootstrap ourselves and that's going to be tricky.
2) Even if that were fixed some, we'd somehow have to make it known that's what's going on here, which is at least as hard.

That is, our internal culture (as you put it) is definitely out there from the perspective of the modern Internet, but it may not be doomed.

Or maybe it is, and we're looking to wither away as the community as a whole ages and has less time to be here (or twist into something rather mainstream-looking with a weird forum potentially attached for legacy reason). Or that, come, say 2022, varied effectively-former members will be looking at the PPC and going "well, we had a good two decades, but it's basically dead".

... yeah, I can see how contemplating this can be depressing.

Looking forward to reading the dragon romance, by the way! I like Ferrux!

- Tomash

So people wanting to page through the last while of missions will be able to do so.

(and the set of tags is something we can configure)

Not a complete solution, but worth noting.

(This is a post that started from me misreading your complaint, Nova, so it's not quite a response to you, but I still figure it needs to be made)

I went through and counted how many folks have been involved an RP in #rudis in the past week, and, though there's definitely something of a core group, I counted 16 folks (I can post the list if it's wanted).

Now, a statistic worth noting is that a bit under half the folks on that list have posts on the front page, and of the folks who have posted on the Board, not all of them have been really participating.

And, now that I've been thinking about the situations I have a few unconnected proposals:
- I'm willing to (and probably will, since I just volunteered for it) throw together a survey thing to gather folks' thoughts on why they're not also here as well as the chat.
- We have control over a bot in the Discord and over the new Board. One interesting thing to consider is some form of Board->chat bridge, so the Discord gets poked about new posts. This will also enable catching up on unread posts via the unread indicators in #board (or whatever), which might reduce the friction involved in needing to scroll down and check all the threads.
- Given the core RP group issue, and since I've noticed this myself sometimes, is #rudis getting crowded? I think it sometimes dose reach that point, and since people are rather unwilling to use #other_rp for overflow, we could maybe use a second RP channel for when the first is busy? Thoughts from the chat-folk?

- Tomash

One way you could fix this (partly) going forward with the T-Board is to add a separate category/subforum tag for mission threads alongside the RP tag; this means any individual mission would take significantly longer to drop off the 'front page' for that section, and it would also be helpful for someone who wanted to look through all the back-missions, while not requiring an extensive reworking of anything.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no idea how this could be fixed retroactively without manually copypasting all the missions into this section, so I don't know how much this would actually help with that.

though I did say post them, not read them

More seriously, I understand the "ow, my old work sucks" thing (which is why I'm not likely to re-read my computational epidemiology paper from 2014. I don't want to be shocked at how that got accepted to a conference, even though it's probably not actually that bad).

And this is definitely more of a problem in the case of people with lots of work that's been improving over time, like you and Ix.

All that being said ... I'm still thinking this might be worth it, even though it's going to involve a lot of looking back at old stuff.

- Tomash

Sooner than expected.

Yeah, not much more to add. Strong ending, lots of great comedy. The phrase "Stabbio Killia" makes me giggle whenever I hear it, but I'm not sure if that's because I Am A Child or not.

You did good, is the point.

I'm going to point out that a lot of missions used to hover in the 10-15 page mark.

I think there's been a trend upwards over the years, but I really don't expect there's anything wrong with missions being shorter than they usually are.

And, if that's just plain not happening, the first thing that comes to mind is that there's still room to revive the Department of Intelligence (yet again). I remember SeaTurtle's Intel reports clocking in at 4-5 pages. Maybe you could be the person to do that?

And on top of everything, from what I've seen of your writing, it's better than you seem to think it is. But I'm pretty sure everyone people here could say that to almost everyone else here (probably including themselves).

- Tomash

So, one thing I've just realized we really don't have these days is a mechanism that's actually used for posting a review (or at least a "that was neat") of something that's not currently on the front page.

I know that, for my mission I put a spot on the wiki for folks to drop reviews, and Nesh has a similar page, but this sort of thing isn't standard practice, let alone discoverable.

I'm not sure how much work can be done to fix this retroactively, but if I had a magic wand, I'd add some way to leave comments (or even AO3-style kudos) on every bit of PPC mission that didn't already have one by way of where it was posted.

(This does not quite solve the problem of people actually using those features, but we can't have the culture of leaving reviews if we physically can't do that)

- Tomash

Okay, I'll admit, I haven't actually finished reading the mission yet. But this is about to slide off the face of the board and the board is about to slide off the internet so I figured I'd best speak now or forever hold my piece.

What I will say is that this feels like a 2004 mission so far. That's not a bad thing! It means that it's lighthearted, for one. Sometimes it feels like the PPC has lost a bit of its whimsy of late...

Necessarily, that does have some cost, but on the whole it's a balance I haven't seen in a while. Because... well, I haven't seen a mission like this in aaaages.

It filled a desire I didn't know I had, is what I'm saying. Well, I guess I kinda knew. But I'd forgotten.

-Thoth, hopefully going to finish the mission now but possibly not because he has a poor track record on finishing things

The AO3 thing, I mean. Definitely something worth trying.

Maybe wait a month or so, because we're about to jump to the new board, so starting now might mean pushing a bunch of potential newbies towards soon-to-be-dead links and then they'll all show up at the 404 or domain not found messages and be very confused.

Speaking of which, the board move might help. Maybe. I'm not sure, but being optimistic about it, it would move us away from an early-2000s interface with a broken login button, which is something I definitely see possibly pushing away newcomers.

For my part, I'm sorry I never end up commenting on your stuff. It's hard to keep up with everything and whenever someone posts a mission my life invariably goes to heck around the same time and then I never read it and... yeah. Not great for everyone else, I know.

Myself, I just have trouble actually writing longform. Always have. Somewhere around 15 pages in I start to get drained... and then I doubt myself... and then I sloowly start to hate everything I've ever written... and then I have to resist the urge to throw it all away. Again.

So yeah, that's why I still haven't published a second mission.

The silence are cool, to be clear. But that plot is... so, so stupid. And it just keeps getting stupider and stupider and stupider...

The Other Problem, the sort of meta-problem if you will, with that issue of not making our existence known is that the PPC fundamentally doesn't mesh well with the internet at large. The forces that created us are mostly dead or diverged from the mainstream and we're left with an internal culture that is likely gonna be very left-field to a lot of newbies.

Culturally, we're closest to Usenet and Forum discourse, as we have the same sort of threading, which promotes topic-focused discussion, rather than the short-form memes and focus on personality that social media interfaces encourage. And we have a lot of expectations that date back to those historical influences, as well as a bias towards long-form posting, that is likely at odds with what any newbie will be used to.

This isn't really a fixable problem. The only way to "fix" it is to change who we are for the worse.

But... well, who's left? Livejournal is dead. The blogosphere isn't what it used to be, Tumblr's terrible threading system ensured that serious conversation would never be that platform's strong suit (even trying to comment on someone's post is a nightmare, just imagine what a discussion would be like...), usenet was on its way out when we were new, and forums just aren't the majority communication form they used to be (they're still around, just not as popular, and they were always fragmented by their very nature anyways).

Social Media won. Reddit is the closest thing now that's still massively popular and the timbre of the place is fundamentally different -- I think all of us know we could never survive as a subreddit. Only the young and naive would even suggest it.

So yeah, we do need a replacement PPC space. Problem is, there's absolutely nowhere suitable to host it.

...that was depressing to write. I'm gonna go write about... I dunno... dragon romance or something to cheer myself up...

"Robots of Sherwood" did give us the Doctor sword-fighting with a spoon, so it wasn't all bad. :P

At least Kill The Moon had cool monsters at first. You can't sit there with a straight face and tell me "The Moon is full of spiders" isn't an amazing premise for an episode of Doctor Who. The spiders themselves were really well designed too!

Yeah, the rest of the episode was garbage, but Robots Of Sherwood was all garbage. I'll take the lesser of two weevils there, methinks. =]

It seems to me like the Board runs in cycles - influx of newbies, lots of missions are written, something happens and people disengage, repeat. Currently, I think we're near the end of that disengagement bit; hopefully, we'll be able to get back to the start soon and that will revitalize things. Looking at the Discord, I think we actually do have some enthusiastic newbies (I count myself, I suppose), but none of them have Permission yet; maybe in two or four or six months, we'll get some new missions.

Regarding the posting of a compilation, wouldn't it be a good idea to post everything (that is, the collected missions from one time period) rather than just selected missions? There's quite a bit of cross-reference and I feel like it would make more sense to readers that way, plus it would last far longer; I reckon we've probably got years worth of missions if you only post up to 2008 or so at one per week. And Ix's planned My Immortal sporking would probably be a useful tie-in given the sheer infamy of that particular fic; maybe you could try to arrange it so that you start around when that's published?

...#they always try to teach the wrong lesson (doot do doo)#

No, wait. But also, yes.

Because if you've been writing for a long time, you look at your older stuff and go: yaaarrrghuuerch that's awful! I haven't wanted to look at the beginning of The Reorganisation for over a decade, for instance, and Dafydd's missions... yeah, no.

So while I totally agree with the principle, I also think that for some of us, it's a bigger job than it looks like.

(Though I would love to clean up Dafydd's stuff and post the whole thing in order, splicing in some extra missions to flesh out his relationship with Connie... maybe someyear. But not yet.)

hS

A big one is that we're hard to find. My main example here is that most of our stuff for the last few years has been on Google Docs. This is the opposite of discoverable for people on the internet.

I'd actively encourage people to, for example, go and post their back catalogs on AO3 (especially given that they don't have FFnet's anti-sporking policy and won't have one as a matter of meta-policy). Maybe not all at once, so it's easier to maintain attention, but still.

Another thing is that, due to the above, we've lost the steady stream of younger folks who have more time to write stuff, and that's creating a cycle of lack of engagement (as Ix alluded to). I don't think this will lead to the downfall of the PPC or anything, but I do think that, for example, we should be actively making our existence known in places where writers and fan-folks are. We used to have (from what I can tell) things like a noticably actively LiveJournal community, but that site died a bit under a decade ago and we don't have a replacement PPC space elsewhere on the internet.

Anyway, these are my preliminary thoughts on the situation.

- Tomash

I'm lucky to get maybe two people commenting on my missions any more these days. I know, I know—we should write for ourselves first and foremost, but when you post something you've worked ages on and get practically no response?

You just... stop caring.

Which feeds into a vicious cycle—nobody's commenting on my stuff, so why should I comment on their stuff? And I know, it's extremely selfish, but there you go. It's disheartening to put effort into things that people don't care about.

I've got a mission that's currently struggling along to be written. I swear I'll pass that 100-mission mark and get My Immortal published, but after that, I don't really know if I'll have the energy to keep going.

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

That... travesty of an episode was called Kill the Moon, and offended me on SO many levels. I'm torn over whether the worst part was 'the thing inside the egg is growing and so gravity is increasing at the surface', 'all of humanity voted to kill it but Clara said no so we still have faith in humanity', or 'it laid another egg identical down to the least crater'.

Series Eight was a very frustrating series for me; it contained utter rubbish like that and 'Robots of Sherwood', but also fantastic episodes like 'Time Heist' and 'Listen'.

~

Doing a bit of hunting around, it looks like the story S.M.F. is thinking of might have been Born of the Sun, by Jack Williamson. This discussion says there's a similar story called And Lo! The Bird! by Nelson S. Bond. I don't think either of them are mine, though.

There are only a few books that I remember being properly scared of as a kid. This was one. Another was a ghost story set during the Blitz. And the third was Robert Swindells' Inside the Worm.

I probably still have all three of them...

hS