Workshop Improvements

Click on your name or avatar pic to the left there <. Your credit score will show up in the little box that opens. Yours is currently at +8.

 

If you click on your avatar picture at the side the little profile window that pops up now shows the credit total toward the middle.

 

Thank You both for this. Too obvious for me I guess. I'm guessing then that my +8 means I have 4 submissions awaiting me?

 

Yep.

 

Just click on your username, a new small window will pop up as an overlay where you will see your user details, including credits.

Edit: Ok, weird, did not see the previous messages at first. Sorry for the redundant post.

 

Edit: removing as redundant

 

I must be deserving of more justified hater points!

 

I had no idea credits were being given where credits were due. I have 21 and am not sure how they got there. I must be more active than I thought. Good for me.

I have wondered why I sometimes get a notice telling me my post is too short and sometimes I don't. I can see clearly now, my brain is on.

 

That's what it tells me. Hey, no biggie. I'm a writer. There are always more words to add.

 

I'm not able to see my credit score. As far as I know, I'm looking in the right place. Could this have something to do with being on my phone?

 

Here's how it looks when it works right.
(Yellow highlighting is my addition.)



This is on my Android

When I click on your avatar, I see 5 workshop credits.

 

Maybe I should have used yours, not mine.



It's what I see on my Android when I click your avatar.

 

Alright guys, I finally have an update on the workshop credits. I've been consulting the developer of the credit's software and two potential freelance developers on a modification to ensure an exact, accurate count.

The new add-on we're using has the ability to reset/recount credits. This means it should be possible to calculate a total based on all workshop history. The current count was imported from the old software, which was demonstrated to have a somewhat inaccurate count.

There is a small roadblock, I'm currently waiting to hear back from the developer about a potential workaround. The old system was supposed to work by 1) excluding replies to one's own threads from credits, and 2) only award a credit a maximum of one time per workshop thread.

The setup can (and does) exclude replies to your own thread from earning credits (good news). Unfortunately, it might not be possible to only award one credit maximum per thread (bad news). The concern here is that if you replies to a thread 2-3 times in the past, you'd earn multiple credits. I'm waiting to hear back from him to see if this is definitively the case. If it's not, we're gravy, and I'll conduct the final update soon.

If this is the case, I can either 1) hire a developer or 1) we can recalculate total credits including all replies to workshop threads, not just each member's first post in a thread.

I'd like some feedback on how you think I should proceed. The first option will take time/money, and I estimate a one month turnaround. The second option will award some additional credits. If additional replies tend to still be feedback-based, maybe it's not a major issue (I could also exclude short posts from the recalculation). Those are the two options. If either route has consensus, I'll take that route.

I'll be catching up on this thread and reviewing any feedback later this evening.

Other considerations currently at play with the workshop:

• Allow posts less than twenty words, but don't count them towards credits (could increase from twenty words, or remove altogether)
  
• Award a higher credit count for longer critiques (if you guys like that idea)
• Make credits visible only to each individual account and moderator team (should they be publicly displayed?)
  
• Hide the credit transaction log/leaderboard
• Evaluate if the Query & Cover Letter Critique forum should require credits (I believe it did in the old version)
  
• Add secondary thread prefixes so we can have sorting for both genre and writing type
• Add workshop-wide sticky thread so the same workshop guide can be displayed in all workshop forums

Please let me know what you think regarding the two options for the credits system. Thank you for your patience! I hope to have the credits system finalized and a new FAQ up soon.

 

I don't suppose it's feasible to add a Reply button such that one button is labeled Post Critique and the other is labeled Post Followup or simply Reply or something That doesn't help in counting the critiques that exist now, but then it doesn't need to, either. Apart from the initial work involved, the main problem I see is when someone mistakenly forgets to use Post Critique and misses getting credit. It would need to be possible to reclassify a post when editing it.

Sometimes you want to say a few sentences, though possibly more than 20 words, without doing a full-blown critique. Of course if there's a limit of one critique credit per thread, one can always come back to do the actual critique.

Is there a reason to keep critique credits secret? How about visible to members only?

Is it really practical to measure shorter and longer critiques? A lot depends on whether you quote the full original, which some people do without the QUOTE tags (since they make it harder to see comments and markups). I've done it both ways. It must be unrealistic to differentiate interspersed comments then from the original text.

There's a transaction log/leaderboard now?

I got at least one set of second comments from a writer who re-read one of my updated versions. That was a considerable investment on their part to do a second albeit somewhat reduced critique, equivalent to some original critiques – including probably a couple of my own. You probably can't automate every reasonable scenario, but that might not be unusual. Is there a way to reward such revisitations?

So back to Option One, the idea is that retrospectively, everybody who posted one or more replies to a workshop thread other than their own gets a workshop credit for that thread. There certainly is an appealing simplicity to it. I can practically visualize the query in my head. There would be some unearned credits for people who just chimed in, and some credits might be missed for second critiques to second versions. Is that such a bad trade-off, retrospectively?

If it's possible to add a table that does nothing but track critique replies versus vanilla replies, then prospectively I'd love to see the separate button for a critique vs follow-up or conversation about a submission. There might be more such conversation, and more conversation might be a good thing as long as it didn't carry the risk of confusing credit counts the way it may have done at some point. It has the advantage that at least a moderator could reclassify a reply and thus correct a mistake while maintaining recalculability. (...calculating differently before and after D-Day.)

 

If it were up to me, I'd have these scores visible to only the management team and the member in question. Mods so that they can quickly and easily check on a member's status (I remember trying to count critiques on my fingers while keeping in mind whether or not they were a second or following post in a thread) and members so that they can see where they are, critique-wise.

When I choose to critique I do so mostly on genre and whether I think I can offer something constructive, not how established a particular member is. I admit not quite understanding the newest requirements so I'm less likely to delve into a complete newbie's work, but I'm not going to go and check someone's leaderboard score before I offer them advice.

Having it visible to the member is useful, especially for newer folks, to make sure they aren't getting "underwater" on their contributions. I was pretty sure I was in the good books before this widget got installed, now I see that I'm +155, which makes me feel better about my twenty-odd workshop submissions. I'm apparently not being greedy. But I really don't care nor do I think I need to see the scores of my former fellow mods, for example, or @newbie666 either. Just shouldn't affect my desire to offer help.

My 2 yen.

 

I'm not familiar with the XF database structure, but surely it'd be easy to only include one post per thread. A simple SQL query to group by thread ID would do it.

SELECT user_id, COUNT(DISTINCT thread_id) FROM xf_post GROUP BY user_id WHERE forum_id = XXX

(or somesuch)

 

I have to say that I don't like the new structure - because it gathers all works together in one big list, threads are likely to be pushed "below the fold" much quicker and attract less attention.

 

I agree with @big soft moose. IMO most new writers are coming here wanting critiques. Forcing them into the 2-1 rule is just going to generate two "Good Job man! I loved the story and didn't see anything that I would change, you really need to finish it and get it published ASAP!" posts that benefits neither party involved. I would rather let them post their story and receive a critique and see how it's done correctly than make the critique into a check the box so they can hurry up and post their own work. If someone obnoxiously abuses the system by posting 20 different works in one day, that should be an easy moderator involvement.

I'll second...or third it...the new workshop format is just a downgrade in my opinion. The new tag n' bag system just ends up with everything jumbled and I see some submissions end up halfway down the page with 0 critiques, not because the submission is bad, but because other threads get replied to, other authors make submissions and it just gets chucked to the bottom where it doesn't get properly noticed. For example, GrahamLewis posted The Sweet Smell of Onions which got no critiques over the course of a day while other works were getting discussed. When I saw it, it was halfway down the page and I noticed it had no critiques so I read it and replied to it. Once bumped back up to the top by my post, it suddenly received four more critiques. I'm not saying this to thump my chest, but to point out that the system, as it exists now, isn't working as intended. I think genre boards made submissions easier to find, especially if you are drawn to critiquing a particular genre.

 

New submissions that disappear quickly are also a function of workshop boards' being default-sorted like all the others, in the order of most recent reply instead of most recent thread creation. The more active they get -- that's a good thing, right? -- the more quickly new submissions will sink, with the current sort order.

I'd simply suggest again that for workshop boards only, be they however few or many, it makes sense for them to be default-sorted by thread age. That keeps the newest submisssions closest to the top. Unread replies on page 1 are still evident from bolding of the thread titles, and it's still a single click to re-sort by the recent-reply column. Aren't new comments on a submission in the last three days more important to the community than new comments on a one-year-old submission? Authors are notified by personal alerts in either case. And there could be a board-specific list-new-posts page to catch necroposts.

Just as a personal preference, genre is more significant to me than length/ form. But I have no problem with having to click on a tag to filter by genre (or form).

I gathered the credit system was originally created to solve an empirical problem. If that's not the case, it does appear to create a lot of work and some confusion for a benefit that is at best hypothetical. Requiring two weeks of seniority and limiting submissions to one per a certain period of time might work as well.

Of course it's hard to make a decision like that after investing a lot of effort into technical refinement of credit counting, but the balance counter is still a useful metric like posts and likes, even if the ideal of maintaining a positive balance is not strictly enforced.

 

The 2-for-1 rule might be deterring huge volumes of spam/troll/junk though, which would only reappear gradually once it was removed.
Junk is a value-judgement isn't it. It would be lovely to think there were enough writers in the world to coach everyone up to J.K. Rowling's level, and that the forum is doing that good work one vampire fanfic at a time. A forum might have a commercial need to flatter hopeless cases who drift in from the internet, and there's no morally-defensible way of ensuring one doesn't... but the lower the first hurdle is, the more bad workshop submissions there will be, and the more the critique turns into "show don't tell... show don't tell..." I think the 2-for-1 rule is good because it only excludes anyone that's pathologically incapable of helping others before they help themselves, or who is pathologically shy. And those types of people often don't engage with the reader enough to learn how to write well.

I'd say to keep the 2-for-1 rule and increase the minimum word count from 20 words to 200. But I'd be fine with reducing how many users, and don't worry that I might miss out on meeting the next Christopher Paolini.

I can't see that it would be worth paying a developer to improve the credit system. Unless the IP is some huge competitive advantage in the cutthroat world of internet creative writing forums, I'd suggest to crowdsource it: put the current code on a thread and let any of the users recommend improvements. The database variables might be specific to Xenforo, but the logic would be done in PHP wouldn't it?

Reading BSM's post, I wonder if the mechanism could stop auto-blocking people from posting to the workshop, but the rule be kept in the background. Then it could be left up to the mods to set the balance between "gatekeeping against heinous abusers" and "being welcoming to new users (even if they have limited FAQ-reading abilities)" The balance must vary over time and having several mods' perspectives on it, plus some capabilities to count credits, must be good. Wouldn't it make more sense to switch on the auto-block and improve how the credits are counted during a period when the forum is having to gatekeep, rather than a period when too many users are being lost?

And it's impossible to enforce, but I'd suggest to ask people not to post first drafts to the workshop. There might be exceptional people whose first drafts are really readable, and who really benefit from having other people's input before they start on the second draft - but those people could get round it by lying.

Having got used to the new workshop layout, I still don't like it. I think either board-per-genre or sorting by thread age would help matters - and possibly both.