What additional forums/sections would you like to see?

No, it's IRC that's old. I don't know anyone who still uses it. Think of WF, only much slow er and without formatting.

 

Yeah. I haven't seen a chatbox in a forum in some time....

 

I wonder if it might be helpful to have a forum section entitled: Writing Techniques. Or something similar. It could be a sub-section, listed under the Creative Writing section, that deals with HOW to achieve certain writing goals within a novel or short story. (Edited 15 October 2018 to add: I was not envisioning this subsection debating WHETHER the author's objective is worthwhile, but rather just insight into HOW the author can achieve it.)

I'm interested right now in learning how to deliberately withhold information from the reader, so it leaks out as a surprise later on. It's a very tricky thing to learn, and many authors get it wrong. You know, those books you finish and say ...Oh, heck, I saw that coming a mile off. Or conversely ...huh, how did THAT happen? Or you're left with the feeling you've been cheated, because your POV character knew what was happening all along, and didn't let on.

I wanted to ask how other forum writers deal with this issue. But it's not clear what subsection to put my question into, so I backed off.

I was recently involved in a discussion (via email) about how to write thoughts within thoughts. In other words, a character is having an inner dialogue with an unknown 'voice' inside his head. Again, I wasn't sure how to shape that so it reads smoothly, and the reader knows exactly what's going on. Or 'how to present a conflicted protagonist without annoying the reader.' It's stuff like that that needs input, but currently there isn't a specific place to do it on the forum.

 

I don't see it in the voting list, but is there a "Sandbox" section? A now-defunct forum I was a member of had a "Your own forum" where you could test out formatting of stories before posting a thread or response to the main forum.

 

So, essentially a place where you can keep private threads to pre-format posts, threads, critiques, etc. before posting them so you know exactly how they will end up? When you are typing a reply to a thread you can hit the "More options" button (to the right of the Post Reply button), then hit "Preview" and you'll get a preview of what the post will look like.
When creating new threads you already are on the "More Options" page so you can just hit "Preview" directly.

(The only down-side to this is that the preview will not be full-width, but it shouldn't really matter. A post should look good for all widths since everyone uses different resolutions, devices, browsers and window sizes.)

 

Yup, that works, didn't even occur to me, thanks.

 

Its not in the list but what about "User Quote Porn", quotes only by members of this board? No 'famous' or overly cited quotes by established personas.

 

Start a thread in the Lounge, see if it takes off.

 

Oh! This is a writingforums, I couldn't tell. LOL

 

I don't see any reason that expiration dates for temp bans couldn't or shouldn't be allowed. In fact, it would help ameliorate initial confusion when a temp ban expires and other members thought it was intended to be a perma-ban. This one is just a matter of does the software provide such a reporting feature or not. I don't know the answer at the moment, but I'm sure it's easy enough to find out. It could likely be executed as a simple user group, which is the basic building block Xenforo™ uses for pretty much everything.

As for a list where ban reasons are given - Daniel will (as always) have to be the one to have the final say on this. At best the information given could only ever be of a general nature. Personally, I am not in favor of such a thing. The way I look at it is the following: We get better than 9000 unique hits in any three month period. That's 9000+ individual memberships that sign in at least once in that three month period. That's well in excess of what the average internet forum sees for their entire history of registrations, all members, from the beginning of the forum until it eventually shuts down. And we have that many members login in just three months. Daniel doesn't do any of the slippery tricks a forum owner can do to make it look like there are more members signed in at any given time than there actually are. You can deny members the ability to hide their signed-on status. You can make it look like someone is signed on hours or days after they've actually signed out. You can fill the seats with a "cardboard crowd" that are either comprised of actual members that are requested (or forced) to never sign out, or they can come from businesses that offer this kind of service.

We don't do any of those things.

The reason I mention any of that is - not counting spambots, but only actual, real members - the number of people who get banned compared to the general foot-traffic of the forum is minuscule, negligible, but we spend an inordinate amount of attention on this minuscule, negligible, but contentious population because it tends to be a loud, "in your face" group of individuals. My personal take on the matter is to afford them the least amount of attention possible in order to give the most attention possible to the members who visit the forum for its intended purposes, who make use of the venue in a way that requires little or no intervention, and then who go their merry way. This quiet population is the hugely vast majority of people who visit our forum.

Basically:

1. The rules are laid out, so members should know what not to do.
2. Members generally receive warnings, informal and formal, when they're venturing into hazardous waters. It takes a lot to get a "lightning ban" even if it's a temp one. We know this is true because of the steady influx of PMs we receive to the tune of "Why haven't you banned So&So yet?" On the whole, regular members have much itchier trigger fingers than staff.
3. Privacy concerns. Someone might be using the same username on multiple sites, get banned here, and straighten up later on. No need to have all their sins listed in perpetuity. Also, someone may have been on the unfortunate receiving end of whatever caused the member in question to get banned and may not want the unsolicited attention of having that made known.
4. Some bans are "Lifetime Achievement Awards," where the proximate cause might seem fairly minor. Drawing up a summary of someone's lifetime achievements upon request is the very definition of a faff.

And last, but not least, it is too much a part of the human condition that people conflate the content of their opinion with the manner in which they express that opinion. That problematic conflation moves in many directions across the board, and we have seen the evolution of that kind of conflation give birth to phenomena like "sealioning", a most disreputable activity, and yet one in which people are able to cobble together a sense of rightness or righteousness with respect to presenting their point of view in whatever manner they deem fit because "That person over there is being ignorant and needs to be shut up".

So, it has been the tradition of this forum to keep that conversation confined to just the staff because the aforementioned pressures are not ones to which we should succumb.

 

I've never heard/read that term before. I'm still not 100% sure what all it entails after Googling it, though I think I have the gist of it.

 

A "General Storytelling" or "Storytelling Theory" subforum for discussing concepts like building suspense, how to continually break your reader's heart, target audience expectations, the importance of tone, and so on.

 

Storytelling Theory would be a great heading.

Do you envision this as a potential thread, or a whole different section of the forum? If it was a thread, do you see a section it could already slot into?

 

I would think its own subforum would be more ideal. That way several topics could be discussed at once without confusion.

In terms of where it could go, I view Storytelling Theory as closely related to the character, plot, and setting development sections. So somewhere near them if possible.

 

The art of storytelling does cross all genres, and it's one that isn't quite covered with the more technical aspects of plot arcs and all that. It also takes in how a story is presented, or 'told.' It would be greatly beneficial to all writers to have a place to talk about this 'art.'

 

@Friedrich Kugelschreiber posted in the Share Your First Three Sentences thread about how he can usually tell if he'll like a book early on based just on prose, which then gave me an urge to create a thread asking how we, as different readers, prioritize what we want out of our books. Things like prose, pacing, characters, themes, etc. And then I wondered: where in the forum should I create this thread?

From what I was told, Book Discussion is just for discussing specific books. The writing forums are for writing (obviously), not reading. And the Lounge and Entertainment sections, while either could serve as a home for reader threads, seem like a poor fit.

Might the Book Discussion section be given more latitude so that it can handle general reader concerns, questions, and topics?

 

Mod hat on: Yeah, we had a discussion 'mongst ourselves, and we Mods are happy to try to implement this really good idea. The question is how—because we don't control the section headlines. But we'll work on it, and maybe come up with a technical workaround. This topic is actually a part of the reading/writing process that, at the moment, has no separate home on the forum ...and it should have. Give us a bit of time, to see if we can get something sorted. Thanks for the great suggestion, by the way.

@EFMingo

 

As things are getting sorted, please feel free to post the reader related questions you had in the Book Discussion thread for the time being. We are trying to break it up a bit, as I'm rather adamant about the value of reading as a writer, but for now we have to deal with what we have. So post all reader related questions under that headline and when we can form new splits or rename the section I'll reorganize as needed. Thank for the purposeful question, as I was having issues with the subject as well.