Forums » Suggestions
Place to stick finished stories
When a story is finished it would be nice to have a place to stick them. This could be done by the Guides as locked threads purged from comments to ease the reading.
+1 This is a good idea.
+1
I would even add that it would be pretty cool for it to include as many past stories that can be found as possible.
I think one of the strongest things that VO has to offer is the fictional universe that it creates. Its very lose and giving to the imagination. The Serco-Itani history is great stuff that can easily be built upon. And the UIT backstory provides the perfect escape for everything in between.
An official place to put them may also cause more to be written and may serve to bring in new players.
I would even add that it would be pretty cool for it to include as many past stories that can be found as possible.
I think one of the strongest things that VO has to offer is the fictional universe that it creates. Its very lose and giving to the imagination. The Serco-Itani history is great stuff that can easily be built upon. And the UIT backstory provides the perfect escape for everything in between.
An official place to put them may also cause more to be written and may serve to bring in new players.
+1
One thing that annoys me with stories here compared to a different forum I frequent is that we do our comments right there in the story's thread. It would be more pleasant to read things if we made separate discussion threads for the stories to avoid having random junk posted in between chapters.
This would need the mods to enforce the rule, since newbies will inevitably goof it up. I don't think the forum has a feature to let them move offending posts out of a thread and into a different one, but instead of just deleting the offending post outright, a warning could be posted giving them 48 hours to copy/paste the content into a new post in the appropriate thread before the mod deletes both the offending comment and the warning comment, leaving the story thread pristine once more.
But maybe this is overkill. People who really want to post their stories serially but without being interlaced with commentary could just edit the first post each time they have additions, then add a new post at the end of the thread to bump it and explain that a new chapter was added to the OP. For stories they know will be particularly long, they could make two initial posts in the thread, back to back. Initially the second post would be just a place-holder. When the second update happens, it would be edited into the second post. From then on, with each new update the previous update would be cut from the second post and pasted to the end of the first post, and then the new chapter would go into the now empty second post. That way the start of the newest chapter could be linked to directly, without having to know in advance precisely how many chapters the story will involve to reserve that many posts in a row.
Anyway, just throwing out ideas.
One thing that annoys me with stories here compared to a different forum I frequent is that we do our comments right there in the story's thread. It would be more pleasant to read things if we made separate discussion threads for the stories to avoid having random junk posted in between chapters.
This would need the mods to enforce the rule, since newbies will inevitably goof it up. I don't think the forum has a feature to let them move offending posts out of a thread and into a different one, but instead of just deleting the offending post outright, a warning could be posted giving them 48 hours to copy/paste the content into a new post in the appropriate thread before the mod deletes both the offending comment and the warning comment, leaving the story thread pristine once more.
But maybe this is overkill. People who really want to post their stories serially but without being interlaced with commentary could just edit the first post each time they have additions, then add a new post at the end of the thread to bump it and explain that a new chapter was added to the OP. For stories they know will be particularly long, they could make two initial posts in the thread, back to back. Initially the second post would be just a place-holder. When the second update happens, it would be edited into the second post. From then on, with each new update the previous update would be cut from the second post and pasted to the end of the first post, and then the new chapter would go into the now empty second post. That way the start of the newest chapter could be linked to directly, without having to know in advance precisely how many chapters the story will involve to reserve that many posts in a row.
Anyway, just throwing out ideas.
+1
Or one of us could make a website for VO Stories
Or one of us could make a website for VO Stories
+1 to a central topic, but
-1 to a new sub-board, or other website. The RP forum isn't exactly overtrafficked as-is... I think putting stories there helps to drive a bit more traffic for the forum while also ensuring that writers do get a few eyes on their work. If they went somewhere else there would be very few views to go around
Miharu had an EXCELLENT and very thorough compilation a while ago... not sure what happened to it but that would be a good starting point.
I think that's the way to do it; a sticky with links to everything (and wow is there a lot), but then leave individual stories as they are now. Personally I liked getting feedback in between posts, and as Pizzas said anyone who is serious about an uninterrupted story can edit it all into the first post.
The one thing that would be nice is if mods helped with cleaning up off-topic posts, because I've seen (and, regrettably, participated in) some serious derailment of otherwise good stories. But they have done so in the past, & short of hiring more mods / enslaving the ones we've got, there's probably not much more to be done any time soon
-1 to a new sub-board, or other website. The RP forum isn't exactly overtrafficked as-is... I think putting stories there helps to drive a bit more traffic for the forum while also ensuring that writers do get a few eyes on their work. If they went somewhere else there would be very few views to go around
Miharu had an EXCELLENT and very thorough compilation a while ago... not sure what happened to it but that would be a good starting point.
I think that's the way to do it; a sticky with links to everything (and wow is there a lot), but then leave individual stories as they are now. Personally I liked getting feedback in between posts, and as Pizzas said anyone who is serious about an uninterrupted story can edit it all into the first post.
The one thing that would be nice is if mods helped with cleaning up off-topic posts, because I've seen (and, regrettably, participated in) some serious derailment of otherwise good stories. But they have done so in the past, & short of hiring more mods / enslaving the ones we've got, there's probably not much more to be done any time soon
The idea was not to change the use of RP forum nor deleting the original thread.
In RP forum you continue to discuss and improve the stories.
In the "Published Stories", no one can post but the devs or the guides. You can have a link to the original RP thread but the copy here is purged from any comments to allow full immersion in the story.
Story is submitted for publishing using the original RP thread by simple request from the author.
In RP forum you continue to discuss and improve the stories.
In the "Published Stories", no one can post but the devs or the guides. You can have a link to the original RP thread but the copy here is purged from any comments to allow full immersion in the story.
Story is submitted for publishing using the original RP thread by simple request from the author.