Figured I'd poke this suggestion back in here as long as forum work is being done. WOTM crew is mostly gone now, but a bunch of the rest of us got together a few months back to get a contest together called 'RPGC,' which tried to toe the line between 'accomplishing what we had with WOTM' and 'keeping the whole thing focused on the community, instead of the community organizers.' We ultimately reached the conclusion that we couldn't pull it off without a subforum to contain all the various contest minutiae, but it seems like some of the dust is coming off the pipes now, and if there's still interest in a regular writing contest across the board, maybe this is worth trying again. I've got all the notes from the RPGC organizational PM threads, and we had pretty much everything done except for the actual text of the first contest, so it would only take just a little bit more work to launch this thing.

Where do you want it?

I was thinking either right up top with the news, or else group it with the Gallery (and maybe articles too) and float those wherever.

I put it below the "Newcomers" forum: <http://www.roleplayerguild.com/forums/44> I've been cleaning up my moderation system so that I can attach mods to specific forums so they aren't burned out by global janitorial work. I'll add you as a mod of the Contests forum when I'm done.


I think that the Writing Contests subforum is going to be useless. I mean, we all remember WOTM and how it used to be popular. Now it isn't because the people didn't care. And people will not care about the new subforum, even galley isn't popular with artwork; but, character sheets from users and RPs. But, I might be wrong. And you have mdk running the contest, I hope that it become as well-known as WOTM.

Well it's not just me. We had a lot of people coming together to talk about ways to _systematically_ keep the contest relevant, and keep community involvement high. Our thinking was that it can't simply be 'What does the contest leadership want us to write about this month?' Like I said, we did a lot of the groundwork already, so once everything's in order I should be able to post the preliminary stuff fairly quick, and open everything right back up to more input. My general thinking is that it's only as good as we all make it, so I want as many people involved as reasonably possible. Anyway I've already got some good stuff to show for our efforts, and once it's all posted we can go from there. But I think WOTM was a really strong anchor to the guild for a lot of people (myself included), so if I can bring back any semblance of that, then more's the better.

Ignore negative nancy up there and just take a crack at it.

I'm excited to see how things go with this! You can count me in for participating in the contests. Good luck with this mdk!

it'll be interesting to see how this goes... If the theme sparks an interest for us, we'll probably participate.

I'm excited to see the return of contests too! Please do let me know if I can help in any way.

The Guild lost a large contingent of off-topic participants, so I reckon that'll be the biggest hurdle -- you're working with a much smaller pond. However, if things get running, I'd like to talk about what I can do to provide first-class support for contests in the software. From storing contests (and their winners) in the database to creating some sort of "Trophy Case" on the user profile. The kind of first-class support we have for Roleplays (in that they have "IC", "OOC", and "Characters" tabs). Making the contest system more visible might encourage participation or at least make it more fun. :) Reach out if you need help.

I'll give it some thought. WOTM used to be all about polls, which would be a great tool to have, though I'm sure we can run contests without a computer counting. Trophy case is _definitely_ something I want to look at -- the planning group I had talked a lot about how to reward writers for participating. Long and short of it is, having something directly tied to the forum (as opposed to an image URL that anyone could take and modify) would be a step in the right direction. We'll have to talk about how to put that into practice -- might be as simple as gold-star, silver-star, bronze-star, but I'd like to solicit some ideas from everyone else, and also get to know the system capabilities a bit before we nail anything down. Something that's springing to mind now is, using that tabbed-thread format like in the RP sections, we could do a lot to clean up contest threads (especially in lieu of polls, and I know there were hider issues when WOTM was running on this version of the site). I'd like to set up three tabs -- one for contest entries, one for discussions/critiques/casual conversations, and one for voting. I'm hoping to experiment with shedding the anonymous-entry format at some point, and this would allow people to simply show up in the thread, read the prompts and rules, and bang out an entry without having to jump through any hoops. Plus it would make tabulating votes a breeze, and if that part is easy, we can get creative with the parameters. Anywho. This is my project for today, well, this and some much-needed housework. Expect to see some product before long.

I moved the forum to the Meta category at the very bottom so it's out of the way until you're ready.

saw that, thanks. I'm working on setting up some email and forum accounts to serve as inboxes, and then I'll be getting a couple more threads banged out and link everything to everything for ease of use.


> The Guild lost a large contingent of off-topic participants, so I reckon that'll be the biggest hurdle -- you're working with a much smaller pond. > > However, if things get running, I'd like to talk about what I can do to provide first-class support for contests in the software. From storing contests (and their winners) in the database to creating some sort of "Trophy Case" on the user profile. The kind of first-class support we have for Roleplays (in that they have "IC", "OOC", and "Characters" tabs). Making the contest system more visible might encourage participation or at least make it more fun. :) > > Reach out if you need help. Visible bling would draw so many people in. The special title that was given in old times was neat. Contra _did_ stop giving those out at some point, though. Was it the reason of the fall? I can't say for sure, but yeah it was. A progressive little trinket below someone's avatar is my suggestion. Iron>Bronze>Silver etc. if you can program an actual method of submission, they can get automatic participation points. And the top 2 or so get more points.