ci5hq | Entries tagged with discussion

byslantedlight.livejournal.com

Having just seen her post, I'm sorry to hear that

przed has decided to step down as comm mod, and since she has directed people to further comment at her own livejournal, I thought I'd better post to the actual community involved about the situation. (I've also responded to the post she made in her own lj.)

Przed states at her own lj that her reason for leaving was due to the change of spoiler/warning policy here at CI5hq. Unfortunately she had not previously taken part in any of the discussions about spoilers/warnings at CI5hq or in Pros in general, nor had she expressed an opinion about them to me. I took this to mean that it wasn't an issue about which she had strong feelings in any direction.

She also states that I took the decision to change the header/spoiler policy without consulting her: several years ago I had been regularly consulting both my co-mods about any changes I was thinking of making to CI5hq. Przed eventually replied to one of my emails saying that I didn't need to do this unless the changes were "major", and that she had every confidence in my judgement. She has never, until now, retracted that statement. While it could be said that changes to the spoiler warning were "major", her lack of participation in any of the posts/discussions etc about spoilers led me to believe, as I said above, that she didn't feel it was a "major" issue.

I'm surprised to see that people are now commenting to agree with her complaints about the changed policy because there were two recent posts made to CI5hq about it, one specifically asking for opinions, and there were no comments made against the idea at all. There were additionally two other recent posts, one of which had comments disabled because I was away, the other which elicited comments about spoilers in general etc from 9 people - and these were both for and against them. I've always been happy to hear other people's ideas (in fact the change in policy sprang from someone else's suggestion, not in fact my own, though I thought it was a good one) to discuss them and to work towards policy compromises that keep as many people happy as possible. Of course it's impossible to keep everyone happy, but I've tried to do my best.

Przed states that only 2/35 people who responded to the poll about spoilers said they didn't want any - in fact this is a slight misreading of the results: 2/35 (5.7%) people said they wanted no information at all, but actually 13/35 (37%) people said they didn't need to know about "distressing content" (ie, "warnings"), which is a not inconsiderable proportion, and it's for those people that I've always tried to find a compromise so that no one is forced to see spoilers but that they can be found if wanted.

For those interested, the discussions I refer to are:
(Recently)
18th May 2010 (post that raised the issue yet again)
18th May 2010 (comments disabled as I was away)
27th May 2010 (suggesting new policy and asking for opinions)
31st May 2010 (asking people to use the new headers)

There were additional discussions over the years, including a poll:
22nd August 2007 (the poll)
24th August 2007
26th February 2009
27th June 2009

In comments to przed's post, concern has been expressed that the new "policy" makes it necessary for authors to post to two separate comms - in fact authors (more likely reccers) don't have to post anywhere at all - all we ask (in common with most other communities in lj as well as in Pros) is that they use the header we suggest on the User Info page. This contains a link for people who do want spoilers to a communtiy that has offered to post them for all fics. People who actively want spoilers are encouraged to post to that community, those who aren't worried about them don't need to do anything. And, as in the wording on the CI5hq User Info page, this is all "suggested" and it "would be helpful if". There's no coersion, there never has been. All we ask is that people are polite and considerate of each other.

Although it is a shame that przed has chosen to step down as comm moderator, in fact she has never been an active moderator except for putting her name to the ci5hq comm when it was created. For anyone who would like a little comm history -

empty_mirrors created the layout and tagged many of the posts. Eventually I fell into helping her with the tagging, and as I was also the person who was posting most to encourage participation in the community, przed and emptymirrors added me as a mod several years ago. I've been the "active" mod ever since, particularly as both emptymirrors and przed have had pressing home lives for some time. I've continued to encourage participation in the comm, especially via Prosfic recs and discussions, and I hope that most people are still happy with this - suggestions have always been, and remain, welcome.

przed.livejournal.com

I have, reluctantly, decided to step down as a co-mod of

ci5hq.

Anyone curious as to why can find the reasons on my own LJ.

byslantedlight.livejournal.com

Following recent discussions and various posts here at CI5hq (including here, here, here, and much earlier in the comm's history here and here, for example), a new header has been devised that will hopefully work as a compromise between people who do and do not want spoilers about Pros fic.

Please could all posts either of or about Pros fic include the following header - and as a header, rather than a trailer. No other information should be included, except the usual form of copyright disclaimer if this is a new story (eg: Disclaimer: Bodie, Doyle and the CI5 universe do not belong to me...). Simply copy and paste this header (which will always be found on the User Info page), deleting the asterisks on the html code to make it work)

Title:
Author:
Pairing:
Link to story or zine/ProsLib info:
Further story information found at <*lj comm="prosficspoilers"*>(delete asterisks for code to work)
Short review: (1 to 3 sentences) If you want to include a longer critical discussion of a story, or a whole zine, please put it behind an <*lj-cut*> tag.

( Explanation and reasoning behind this change )

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*

constant-muse.livejournal.com

This is a first - the “Tuesday announcement” post last week elicited more discussion than the fic itself.
Did the contributors exhaust themselves with that discussion? I wonder, or was it was the subject of The Story of my Life? Which would be a shame because as

the_other_sandy’s excellent review and readers’ comments suggest, it’s a well written story and a rewarding read.
Many thanks,

the_other_sandy for the rec, and I hope you are not too deterred by the controversy it sparked.

This Week:
Record number 2 for this week is the rec – “Waiting to Fall” by Rob – I believe the longest Pros fic ever published.
Looking forward to a post by

jgraeme2007 here later this week.

( The Future )

Current Location: The Reading Room

kiwisue.livejournal.com

OK, so I've been watching the warnings debate, and I've made a post in my own lj about what I, personally will do in future, because that seemed fair and reasonable, to let people know. And I didn't want to say "caveat lector" even though I do (rather selfishly) appreciate it, as a reader who doesn't have any major triggery issues but who really, really doesn't like spoilers.

But there was something about certain presentations of the pro-warnings argument that had me wriggling in my seat, fundamentally disagreeing with something in many, many of the posts, only I didn't know quite how to articulate it. It was something to do with the connection between "if you don't warn you are made of fail" and "it's only fanfic, what purpose is there in talking about artistic integrity", only I couldn't put my finger on it.

Then today I followed some

metafandom posts and found the beginnings of what may become Phase II of the discussion - people thoughtfully disagreeing with the concept of blanket warning and/or labelling conventions saying why. Here are two examples:

1. in which swanswan makes the following point in comments: The subject of the presentation of our creative works is important to a lot of people, and there are valid reasons to be concerned about any blanket ruling on how those fictions should be treated. These issues have ramifications, and though they do not seem as pressing (and are not as pressing) as the plight of someone seriously affected by a disturbing story, they exist, and go to the heart of what we are as community and as artists, however pretentious that may sound.

2. In which phoebe_zeitgeist puts some pretty big ideas forward, very eloquently. My summarising here is probably crap, and missing many nuances, so go read what she says for yourselves, but anyway - she says that while a lot of fan writing, and reading habits, are about "comfort reading", "...Not all readers are looking for comfort reading, and not all writers are trying to provide it." As well as noting that many of the fics she likes to read don't fit comfortably into categories, she argues that a set of labelling conventions would in many ways impact on writers from the moment of story conception, with the end result being an increasing sorting or categorisation of fanworks, and that this is actually harmful in that it tends to limit the possibilities that writers may entertain.

That's the background. Discuss it if you wish, but really what came to mind and prompted me to post were these thoughts (which aren't, you know, solid opinions, but definitely ideas I'd like to kick around the restroom):

Is it possible we (in Pros) are already affected by a kind of categorisation, or 'streaming' of creativity? That there's more of a tendency to write according to a formula than there was 10, 20 years ago, when everything was new and in many ways revolutionary? Maybe because there's more knowledge around about story arcs, or "how to write a bestselling romance novel", we feel more secure following the same steps rather than stepping out on our own? Or does writing for a specific audience & their known likes/dislikes encourage more of the same? Writing for a particular comm - do people have different ideas about the sort of fic they'd write for a DIALJ challenge, or for the_safehouse or for T&SR? Does it matter if my next story is very much like the last one I wrote? What are we doing this thing called fandom for, anyway *g*?

Please discuss.

kiwisue.livejournal.com

*Tick-tock. Tick-tock.*

One of the problems of being half a world or more ahead of most of your flist is that if something's scheduled for suchandsuchaday you kinda think it should be happening now, not in 8, 12 or more hours. When tired, after-work brain finally wakes up to the fact that it's only just turned into Thursday over on the West Coast, you realise you have ~~a few hours to kill~~ the opportunity to think/talk about something else.

My "something else" tonight is Warnings. During the last Reading Room discussion a few of us veered a little off topic & started talking about this subject. It comes up in Pros every now & then, and has done so slightly more frequently over the past few months if I'm any judge of such things. The various positions are fairly entrenched - although this time I felt I was talking to people who were at least prepared to try & understand the 'opposing' point of view. Anyway, lo and behold, there was a post linked to

metafandom on the very same thing just today.

You can read

metafandom's warnings posts bookmarked on delicious here. There are a ton of them - I'd recommend telesilla's post as one where the various positions are stated, frequently with some vehemence. It's clear the "warnings" debate is not done & dusted in the rest of fandom, is all I want to say about that. Read 'em if you're interested.

So, what really interested me about the newest post was This Thread which contains some civilised discussion between people I know hold very different points of view. And I simply adored this quote: " flexible warning options FTW *g*.

Because I'm not anti-warning for everybody, but I am anti having my own reading pleasure diminished by spoilers. And I understand that imperfectly rendered lj-cuts leave readers who want particular types of warning but don't want to be spoiled for other content through automatically processing at least some of the story while scrolling down the page to the trailer might have a problem! I want those 'flexible warning options', but it seems to me that we won't have them until people are a lot better trained-up in how to do them.

So my intent is to describe as clearly as possible the various options for "optional warnings".

( This way for more )

That's it! Hope some of you found it useful.

ETA: I'm getting comments re-hashing the "should there, or shouldn't there be warnings". To which I say - my post aims to get around that problem and give readers, whoever they are and whatever their preferences are, what they need! Please don't rehash the old!!!!

(also, am going to bed in a minute - because it's late Down Under)

byslantedlight.livejournal.com

Thank you to everyone who filled in the poll the other day - I had no idea there'd be so many responses, it was brilliant! I thought I'd write up a quick summary for anyone interested (ie, at least me *g*) - (not double and triple counted/checked, because it's quite late on a Friday night here, so if anyone wants to get mathematical and check my numbers, feel free!). Otherwise, some interesting facts from the poll (!):

1) 35 respondants ticked 52 boxes. (This is obviously because I was rubbish, and didn't make box "F) Some other combination, please comment" clear enough! My punishment was that I had to go through most of the comments again to summarise responses properly.)

2) 32/35 people would like to know in advance whether a story is slash/het/gen. (I have obviously screwed up here somewhere too, cos only 2/35 people said they didn't want any information at all, but everyone else said they wanted to know about s/h/g, which should clearly be 33/35 - but wasn't...)

3) 4/35 people liked to know the rating in advance (again, I'm a rubbish poll-writer, I worded it badly cos I forgot that ratings can be used as a positive signpost for when we want the ~~good~~ explicit stuff, so maybe more people would have liked it really)

4) 22/35 people wanted to know whether a story might contain something distressing for them (like death, rape, bdsm) (More than I thought!)

5) 2/35 people didn't want any information about a Pros story before they read it (They'll read anything - even het! *ducks things thrown by co-mods, and pokes tongue out at at least one of them* (*g*))

6) Several people made very interesting points about things like a searchable index for archives, for those lost Pros stories that you know involved a dinosaur, but you can't remember the title or author; warnings for AU and crossovers, and... oh, other interesting things that I can't quite remember but it's worth going to look if you haven't already. *g*

So... *g*... That was fun. We must do it again one day!

byslantedlight.livejournal.com

Somewhere along the way I've picked up the impression that Pros fans tend to be divided most strongly into either slash, gen or het (or various combinations thereof) readers, and that it is on this basis first that we decide whether or not to read a particular Prosfic story. Following an interesting discussion a few weeks ago about labels/categories/warnings etc on Prosfic, Circuit Archive is experimenting with including other information in their lj (and presumably other) updates, and this has got me thinking about it all again - in a rather needs-first-coffee-of-the-morning kind of way!

Basically, I know that I hate all warnings etc on a Prosfic story that I'm about to read, except that I'd like to know whether it's slash, gen or het, because I adore slash, I'll read gen if there's some reason to (or a chance of adding my own subtext!) and I don't want to touch het with a bargepole... a very long bargepole! During the discussion, I came across the idea that most people would view a label of slash, het or gen (or the story's pairings, which actually is a much smarter way of telling us whether it's slash, het or gen!) as the same kind of "spoiler" as, say a deathfic warning, which completely surprised me, took me aback, and got me thinking even more... *g*

And then I remembered that lj lets you do those poll-thingies, and wondered if I might try one of those... though I'd like to hear what people think as well as just seeing numbers, so please do comment as well! So - what kind of, if any, information do you look for before you read a Pros story? (And I'm not really going for the to-warn-about-deathfic/rape/non-consensual debate here, although I've included it in my question and I'm curious about numbers there too, it's more the broader sense of the question - and do we care about age ratings? Are there other things people consider that I've never even thought of?!) So, without further ado:

[Poll #1043269]
I've never tried doing a poll before, so here's hoping it works - do let me know if you have problems... Oh, it looks like you have to vote first, and hit submit, and then comment afterwards - you can't comment and vote at the same time (I just tried it...)! And non-lj members can't vote (says lj, not us), but you can still comment!