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

[constant-muse.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great idea. I think it would be fun to write warnings/spoilers for many fics, like mini-recs.

It could be part of the routine for the Reading Room that a post goes on to that comm about a fic when it is first mentioned.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

It is a good idea, isn't it - though I'd hope it wouldn't go too far down the mini-rec line, cos that's what CI5hq is for! If you kill off CI5hq with it, then the people who don't want warnings will lose out completely, and Pros as a community will be split yet again... This is supposed to be a happy compromise for everyone!

[constant-muse.livejournal.com]

I see heliophile also raised the review comm idea. I would see it not so much as splitting the Pros fandom, but diluting the comms further, esp. CI5hq. A divide could develop, however, in that those who like spoilers/warnings might prefer to do all their reccing/reviewing over there.

As I initially understood the idea, it was just to post bare titles of fics with just a few words each, i.e. warning labels. My point above was that it would be quite fun to do that - to read or re-read a fic with a view to 'labelling' it with relevant warnings or other info for the benefit of this comm.

It's for the mod/s of the "spoiler" comm. to decide what categories of information should be posted there (if there is to be any limitation as to categories). If it's quite limited, i.e. the usual warnings, then it wouldn't be a substitute for posts about fics at other comms.
On the other hand, if it is more general 'spoilers', where one described something of the plot, then it would virtually become a mini-review.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she wondered if people would start to write longer reviews there too - and it's totally possible, but I think it'd be a shame. I think the original thought (as described to me) was what you've said here - the bare bones of what's in a fic for use in announcements etc, rather than full reviews. Title, author (for identification) and then - this fic is full of spiders and I felt icky or whatever people are worried about. I suppose you could call that a mini-review, but I'd think of reviews of any kind more in the nature of whether someone liked the story and why rather than just describing the plot... I think we're probably defining "review" slightly differently actually, aren't we?! *g*

ETA - yeah, dilution might be a better word than "split"...
ETA 2 - sorry, I'm being rubbish today!
in that those who like spoilers/warnings might prefer to do all their reccing/reviewing over there
Yeah, and that's what I think would be a shame, because then you'd lose the input of people who don't want spoilers (and that's not just me, as we found out at the poll a couple of years ago, though it sometimes feels like it - it's certainly the quieter side of Pros fandom though!) and those people would also lose the discussions - it'd all be so much more limited, and Pros isn't that big anyway...

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Not that I think it should lean towards the rec/review-ish, just that I wonder if it might end up that way. Something really bare-bones would probably work better. As for the spoilers/warnings themselves, personally I just wanna check ultra-quickly that they're both still alive (and preferably don't hate each other) at the end! But of course I appreciate that everybody has their own preferences! Preferences that generally mean a lot to us and condition the whole reading experience.

My main doubt is just that it might prove unwieldy - but this is from someone who has difficulty remembering which way is up on days ending in y, let alone where to post X as opposed to Z.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Oh, unwieldy in what way? There's no reason why it should if people just tag the name of their spoiler with the title and nothing else... or am I missing something? *g*

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Not thinking super-complicated or anything like that - just not sure yet how it will feel to use. I'm one of those people who wishes everything were to be found (perhaps in a few different rooms) in a one-stop-shop, I suppose! (I even wish sometimes that there were fewer comms to keep track of, though of course the great thing with lj is that they can all come up on one screen - so I suppose this will soon feel like just another extension of the Pros-lj-verse when we are used to it).

apropos of nothing (except perhaps the multiplicity of comms) - I'm looking forward immensely to the BB, of course, but also very much to more dialj in due course. There's something immensely satisfying and attractive about the dialj compilations - they're really a bit special, I think. But of course it has to be when people aren't stretched too thin - maybe that's the trouble with expansion; not enough people with not enough time to keep them all vibrant? Oops, I'm veering way OT here - /digression!

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Veer away, trust me I'm liking the diversion from the same old same old every six months or so! Hopefully the comm will work out and we can all just get on with writing and reading stories again!

I know what you mean about so many comms to keep track of - I do rely on my flist page for keeping track of it all! But yeah, it's the "stretched too thin" thing that makes such separate expansion difficult in a relatively small community like Pros - suddenly it's not one big happy community any more, but a number of very small ones... I've been wondering if it's been stretched thin enough that Discoveredinalj has effectively become irrelevant to be honest, so it's nice to hear that you think it still has a place... but only if there are enough writers around prepared to take part and keep it vibrant... And it's hard to know... I will post another challenge soon, and we'll see how that goes on!

ETA - I'm so rubbish today at keeping my thoughts together! I remember back when Josey and I were talking about starting Dialj, we wondered if it was splitting the community a bit, and the same with CI5hq - but there were very specific reasons for starting them (as described somewhere else in this thread!) and it had to be done...

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

yes, the problem is having enough writing coming along to keep any given comm feeling lively, when it's a relatively small number of people writing altogether - I can hardly complain, when I've only ever written a handful of things myself! I think you said somewhere yourself that it would make sense to take account of the BB taking up so much of many people's time and attention before doing another dialj (and of course it will be a joy to have long fics to read as well as the predominantly small-to-medium fics that tend to get written for the shorter timescale. It's just that I want it all ... when you're an addict, you can never get too much of your fics fix *g*). Part of me sort of wishes there were just one big comm for actual writing, with both long- and short-term challenges, prompts, etc all in different "rooms" but on the same comm ... but I can see how that might not work in practice, there are different ideas around about how to do things and it's also true that different places have different flavours ... hmmm. And still OT *g*

[potztausend.livejournal.com]

I am just imagening the warnings about a story *g*:

"Attention: Bodie and Doyle have sex!"

"Read carefully: Bodie and Doyle are in love!"

"Extra precaution: Bodie and Doyle are buying curtains together!"