Prosfic Spoilers - up for discussion again - with a shiny new idea...

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

ladymeander contacted me last night with what I think's a fabulous idea to help solve the issue of those-who-want-spoilers vs those-who-don't-want-spoilers, and I said I'd post about it today and see what other people thought. So...

What about setting up a Pros comm dedicated to spoilers for Prosfic? Prosficspoilers could be a place where anyone could go and find the spoiler information they needed. People who don't want spoiler information simply wouldn't go there! It could be used from CI5hq or any other comm, and even by people reading stories on the Circuit Archive, Hatstand, ProsLib or anywhere else that they worried didn't give them enough spoiler information.

People/contributors would simply post their spoiler information at the comm however they want to, and then tag the entry with the title of the story. The tags list would then show a long list of stories with spoiler information and simply clicking the title would bring that information up.

It would keep headers/trailers at all the Pros comms who wanted to use them nice and simple (no worrying about how to do coding of any kind):

Title:
Author:
Pairing: (the one piece of extra information that all but 2/c100 people polled said they wanted - and those 2 people didn't even care what fandom they were reading in *g*)
Story Information: Prosficspoilers [comm link]

And it could be used for new fic as well as reviews/recs, and also for stories where the authors/reccers don't believe in spoilers. For example, I'll never include spoiler information of any kind with one of my stories, but people who wanted that information could post it themselves over at Prosficspoilers and it could be found there.

What do you reckon? I can't believe no one's thought of it before! If people like the idea, then I could set up the comm with the appropriate settings, and then hand it over to anyone who volunteers to be a mod, and it'd be away - no muss, no fuss... *g*

Comments

spoiled *g*

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Pro - I'd love to be able to check for more info about stories, not just because I want to avoid my own personal turn-offs but because I'd like to be able to actively search for turn-ons. Although whether or not that would be possible in practice would depend on how much "spoiler" info there was, of course. Would the new comm be searchable by category-of-warning/spoiler? (by clicking on tags, I suppose?) Do you think it would tend towards the rec/review, as well as main warnings? (just wondering what you think might happen; obviously that would depend on the individual contributor). Personally I suspect I'd probably just have a quick glance at the end to make sure they're both still alive .... *bg*

Con - adds a little extra bother to the act of posting a story (you have to post the story and the spoilers/warnings separately, and then create a link between the two?) and - for those who want to - to the act of checking up on a story before reading it (though not much, in this case - it would just be a click away, iiuc? Or would you click through to the new comm and then have to search for the specific fic within it, which would be a bit further to go)

agh, re-posted because I keep screwing up!

Re: spoiled *g*

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Con - adds a little extra bother to the act of posting a story (you have to post the story and the spoilers/warnings separately
No you wouldn't do this - you'd just copy and paste the header format from the user page (as you do now), and the link would be a general one to the spoiler comm, and would automatically appear on all headers. You then just look down the tag list for the title and click on that. So the whole thing would involve clicking on just two links, rather than having to learn how to do html coding etc. So actually less bother to posting a story!

ETA - argh, you asked about whether it would become a review comm or not - to be honest I'd hope not, cos that's what CI5hq is. If Prosficspoilers became a review comm itself, then it would just split the Pros community into two, and duplicate discussions. There's already been a split like that in Pros lj generally, and I think it's a shame.

As to whether you'd have categories of warnings - that'd be up to the comm members to decide. Quite honestly it's one of the reasons I hate dealing with this whole spoiler/warning issue in the first place - it's putting the onus of pleasing individual tastes on the community rather than the individual, and it's such an individual thing that getting too specific about it makes more work for people and takes away from other things a comm/mod/writer/artist etc could be doing in the first place! I'd rather be writing stories than spending time worrying how to tag them etc - so I'll leave that up to Prosficspoiler comm members to work out, I'm not even going to try to guess for them! *g*

Re: spoiled *g*

[callistosh65.livejournal.com]

There's already been a split like that in Pros lj generally, and I think it's a shame. Spoiler issue aside for a second, I am a little puzzled by this and I'm wondering why you see it as a 'spilt' and not a 'blossoming'.

I remember when I first found Pros on lj, I think the_safehouse was *the* posting comm for all things Pros. Then you and others set up the wonderful discoveredinalj (still responsible for about half my output:-), and also ci5hq. Now we also have, for example, the recently set up teaandswissroll and ci5_boxoftricks for the Big Bang.

I'm actually chuffed to bits that our relatively small fandom is still so active, ever-changing, and evolving here on LJ.

I guess I'm just curious as to where you see a split, and why.

Re: spoiled *g*

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

When I first found Pros the_safehouse was the place to post all things Pros - except that the mod at the time increasingly had very stringent rules about the wordings of things in headers, and, it turned out, would delete comments and posts that she didn't like. She also refused to allow Prosfic recs and discussions, despite people saying they'd like to be able to do that. She ran a couple of gift-exchange Pros comms (santa_pros and summerof78) and actually didn't post stories and artwork that had been sent to her, despite telling people she would - and in some cases commissioning it. When I was first in Pros she ran a weekly challenge at SH, which seemed fun and popular, which eventually just trailed away and left nothing in its place. When Josey and I offered to run challenges there, we were told that we could send in our ideas, and the new mod would post them - once checked over by the old mod who in fact was still running things (including blocking HG's membership of SH). This sort of behaviour on behalf of the old mod worried people, and it led to two things - Josey and I setting up discoveredinalj where we could run challenges that were now missing from Pros on lj, and Josey and PRZed setting up ci5hq where people could post recs and discussions, and where people who'd been put off posting at SH could post whatever they wanted without fear of being shouted at or being deleted. So there were very specific reasons for those two comms to set up - they were filling gaps in the Pros lj community.

I felt there'd been a split when teaandswissroll was set up, because it wasn't offering anything that wasn't already in Pros lj - the posts there could all surely be made to Safehouse, for example.

The Big Bang is something completely different, so that's good - but it's been interesting to see that it's also had an impact on discoveredinalj, and it's why I've not posted a challenge there fore a while. People are working on their long fic, and a few people are responding to the weekly challenges at t&sr (in a way they didn't when Drayce was posting them to SH, which is a shame). No one at all wrote for the Chinese New Year challenge at Dialj, and there were only a few entries for Robeau's Nightmare challenge. I know I should post another challenge to Dialj, and I do plan to, but it's alot of hard work if people aren't really bothered about it or not, so... I haven't managed to get up the enthusiasm for it yet. *g*

So I do think there's been recent duplication of some elements of Pros on lj, as well as simply its expansion via Big Bang for example - there's only so many people in Pros (we seem to lose and gain at a roughly steady rate, somehow!), who can only write so much, so inevitably if some things expand others are going to die off...

People only have so much time to devote to lj, and if there was also a second recs/reviews comm (rather than one that contributed to the existing comms, as I think Prosficspoilers could do) then that might mean that the quieter members of CI5hq lost out on the non-spoilered side of things as there was less posted without spoilers. Surely better to post recs for both sides of the spoiler issue?