I have a couple of quick questions to the members of this site who peruse the Fanfiction/Stories board.
1. It's come to my attention that people can't open my fics in particular because many of you do not have MS Word and cannot open .doc files. To that end, I would like to ask if you guys would prefer .rtf format (which Notepad and Wordpad are able to open with little problem), or if you want me to copy and paste my stories up on the board in the posts the same way as a lot of other members do?
2. I've noticed a shocking lack of reviews for most fics on this site. Now, I'm not really all for trying to make it mandatory to review those fics, but I feel I must ask you, the members, for ideas on how to get people to actually review these fics. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't post my works up here just for you guys to ignore them. I would like people to review them and comment on them and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make them more attractive to the members shy of changing my writing style or my chosen fetishes.
So I need ideas on how to promote reviews not just for my works but for all the works currently up on the site. =|
Thank you.
What about the really old ones? Can we review them, or would it be a violation of "Do not Necro old threads"?
Thread necro'ing does not apply to the Fanfiction board, no.
As long as you have a comment about a fic or a story, it's okay to revive old threads there.
Oh okay!
I've read some good fanfics in the past on here, but didn't comment on them because I was afraid of necro'ing a thread.
The first point we've discussed on IRC, so I'll leave my thoughts about RTF out of this. In case you change your mind and do publish some fics as .doc, I'd like to point out the following to those who are having trouble opening it:
- MS Office is not the only Office suite available. Take a look at OpenOffice (http://"http://www.openoffice.org/"). If that's not good enough, take a look at this list (http://"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_suite") for more suggestions.
- If you (like me) refuse to install things like office suites, consider Google Docs.
- Finally, if one of these works for you, please do share it with us. Both Google Docs and OpenOffice can save to PDF -- that will be readable for almost everyone everywhere, so please upload that if you can.
On the matter of reviews -- encourage authors to reply to them. A discussion will likely prompt more people to comment on the content. Even just the author posting an evaluation of how the writing went and what he or she thinks of the story would prompt me, personally, to give much more thought about what I thought of it.
For the first issue, my suggestion is kind of a medley of suggestions. I think you should post the stories onto the forums, AND post a downloadable file within the topic just in case your readers want to save it to their computers. (this suggestion acutally goews out to all the writers out there)
For the second one, I think it's more psychological. I saw a discussion about this earlier somewhere on the forums, that the conclusion they came to (which I kinda agree with) is that people are more likely to reply if you post the story as a topic. "I'm in the topic, so I might as well post a review" is the thought going here.
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That being said, my other suggestion (which is actually mine) is that writers should post the stories to the forums, and then set up a reply topic for that story. Example:
Desperate Girl (Actual Story)
Desperate Girl Reply Topic (the topic for posting reviews for Desperate Girl)
Like I said, this is just a suggestion, and I don't see this happening anytime soon.