Contest frequency

[Claire]

@chloevee had a talk recently about whether contests are too frequent to keep up with. Are we having too many contests in too little time? Or is the frequency maybe even too low? My current plan is to start another contest in a week from now that will then have a 3 week writing and 2 week voting period since it will be our first medium length story contest. Meanwhile, the tournament will continue in parallel, but in two weeks from now only the four semi finalists will be occupied with writing stories for the contest, so the majority of contestants should be available for other contests if they want to.

Personally, I got the impression that the community needs the stimulation through contests to get even the slightest bit of activity going. But you could also make the argument that the contests draw away the attention from all stories that don't participate in a contest and therefore have an adverse effect. Personally, I currently feel so dejected by the lack of participation of the community in the tournament and the Femdom Fury contest that I'm considering withdrawing from the tournament myself. Despite 16 people signing up for the tournament, we had on average only 4.33 people commenting on the contest stories. 4.08 of those were other contestants. Only 0.25 non-contestants commented on average on the Round of 16 stories, namely @JTCK who commented on 3 of the 12 stories.

What do you think?

[Shocker]

I do love contributing in contests, which likely doesn’t come as a big surprise to anybody. But I would like to caution about too many at the same time. While everybody is busy working on their entries, other forum activity and work on unrelated stories often come to a halt. So keeping a regular schedule or spacing between the frenzies of activity seems to be prudent.

[RapeU]

I liked the system of TBV where you had a month to write a story based on whatever words/theme was chosen then a month to vote on which story you liked best to win. I think there was only one time I didn't participate and that's just because I wasn't inspired by the theme to create something. Participation is always going to vary, so I wouldn't get too hung up on it because there was a time where I think only 3 people did the bimonthly contest.

What will help the most is a consistent predictable system where the only thing that changes are the themes. Something like this:

A tournament once a year, probably best time is on the anniversary of when the forum became available for users to register so around April, or could do one in January

A long story contest every 6 months - 6 months to write the story with a theme/words then give people a month or two to read and vote. This idea might not work, but it's worth a shot to try it and see.

Medium/short story contests every other month similar to TBV system - 1 month to write a medium/short story then give people 1 month to vote

Flash story contest every other month (so every month it's either medium/short or flash) Since flash stories don't take that long to be read two or three weeks should be sufficient time to vote for favorite depending on how many.

[Shocker]

I liked the system of TBV where you had a month to write a story based on whatever words/theme was chosen then a month to vote on which story you liked best to win. I think there was only one time I didn't participate and that's just because I wasn't inspired by the theme to create something. Participation is always going to vary, so I wouldn't get too hung up on it because there was a time where I think only 3 people did the bimonthly contest. ..

to be honest I can't remember a single contest you weren't the first to enter a banger of a story.

[LtBroccoli]

I think it's a little too frequent now, only because there's two going on at the same time. In the last three weeks I've written 3 contest stories and none of my backlog or new stories. That said, I wouldn't mind adding more as long as we break things down and identify what's going on.

I'm thinking of three categories, Contests, Tournaments, and Challenges. Contests could be once a month or so, theme or prompt changes each time. Tournaments might be quarterly or twice a year to give more time to digest them. Challenges would be special things like NaNoWriMo or the like. Challenges won't have a winner or loser per se, but it's just the satisfaction of completing them.

Also, I'm in favor of changing up lengths and requirements for these things. Like I've said before, I find it harder to write a short story than a longer one. It's like having a budget for a movie. It's easier to work with a 10k budget than a 5k one.

[Lucius]

I think it's a little too frequent now, only because there's two going on at the same time. In the last three weeks I've written 3 contest stories and none of my backlog or new stories. That said, I wouldn't mind adding more as long as we break things down and identify what's going on.

The near-absence of involvement with the tournament baffles me. I'd be glad if just a few of our non-participating members would say why they didn't comment and vote upon any of the tournament stories.

My current plan is to start another contest in a week from now that will then have a 3 week writing and 2 week voting period since it will be our first medium length story contest.

The contest frequency seems reasonable to me overall. That said, in my admittedly limited experience August is a dead month forums-wise, perhaps we need to test the participation waters first?

[Blue]

@Claire
Regarding the frequency of contests, I see things similarly to @RapeU . A certain consistency regarding the scheduling of contests is important. And I think it's even more important that members have enough time to rate the stories. Not everyone has the time to check the forum once a week and then read maybe ten contest stories at once.

Regarding participation in contests: I enjoy writing stories, and if the topic is appropriate, I submit them to contests. I didn't participate in the femdom contest, however, because I can't relate to the topic at all.
If a contest with a medium-length story comes up, I'll probably participate again. I'm currently writing a long story that I planned to post as a serialized story in several chapters. But I can probably just split the story into two stories that could be read practically independently of each other. But only if the contest theme is appropriate.

[Vela Nanashi]

I think having a hard limit may be the wrong answer, I think we should keep the door open for extra contests when someone feels motivated to put one up. However I also know from experience on another forum that contest participation is very varied, some months there can be a lot of participation, and others one or no authors enter a story, and that is not fun for the contest creator, but it is still something that we may have to realistically accept as possible as an outcome without getting utterly dejected if that happens.

As for the tournament I feel bad that I was unable to comment and rate things, even though I was a participant in the tournament, I wanted to comment and rate each story, but I was too broken physically and due to that mentally, too much pain and exhaustion, so I am sorry fellow contestants that I did not comment on your stories.

I also think there may be issues with people having time to read 16 stories in a limited time, especially if away from forum things like in real life/away from keyboard things demand attention, like happens for some of us, even if we desire to participate daily or weekly in the forum, maybe we just can't, and due to how things behave at times these inactivity periods of many users will overlap.

One way we might be able to solve that possibly is to have a contest require X participants to post a story to the contest (this is harder for tournaments) giving a flexible time to write stories dependant on the slowest user. Then when reading starts we wait for Y votes/ratings averaged per story, so voting period is also dynamic in length, we can of course also put a dynamic cap of time, but this way we can balance duration of each contest with participation, so when people are having a slow week, month or so we can absorb that, while if we are having a manic creative time we can run many contests during that, to absorb energies available in a nice way.

To me I think contests are a nice compliment to regular writing as it can poke you out of a writing rut, by giving you a suggested prompt to work with.

Something I enjoy from another forum I am on is that every registered user can suggest themes/prompts in a list of their own, and then we pick the top one from every list and then users vote for what prompts they like and we pick the top ones for the next contest, loser themes/prompts are put to bottom of each user's prompt list, winning ones are removed from their list and put in a second list of used up prompts. This also would allow users to maybe get a story written with their prompt that they would like to see used, and if it is popular among all users it will become part of a contest. Also maybe we can do a story can use one of three prompts we pick, if we want an easier contest for authors, or if we want tougher we do two or three of three prompts, just an idea there.

Overall though, speaking only for myself, I am a lot slower at reading a story properly (proper means I write a comment and rate the story when I read it), I have forbidden myself from just reading a story without commenting and rating it, I am not sure if others do that too, but I do, so for me there is a bit more of a threshold of energy and time availability before I read a story.

Then there is also the question if what the story says on the tin is interesting for me or not, and that I assume is true for all readers, do I love the author, do I love the tags, do I love the title, is the teaser interesting. My interests are probably rather extremely niche on this forum, and I am sure the opposite is true too, my stories will not interest others as much, due to being very out there compared to forum average interest, and that will alter my interaction with other stories and readers interactions with mine.

Anyway sorry for being Field Marshal Obvious so much in this post, just felt like expressing these things even if they are obvious things that maybe don't matter.

[Lucius]

I think having a hard limit may be the wrong answer, I think we should keep the door open for extra contests when someone feels motivated to put one up. However I also know from experience on another forum that contest participation is very varied, some months there can be a lot of participation, and others one or no authors enter a story, and that is not fun for the contest creator, but it is still something that we may have to realistically accept as possible as an outcome without getting utterly dejected if that happens.

It's good to see members creating stories, commenting and rating posts in these dog days of summer -- my earlier comment on forums being dead in August in no way devalues their contributions.

As for the tournament I feel bad that I was unable to comment and rate things, even though I was a participant in the tournament, I wanted to comment and rate each story, but I was too broken physically and due to that mentally, too much pain and exhaustion, so I am sorry fellow contestants that I did not comment on your stories.

Wishing you all the best!

Something I enjoy from another forum I am on is that every registered user can suggest themes/prompts in a list of their own, and then we pick the top one from every list and then users vote for what prompts they like and we pick the top ones for the next contest, loser themes/prompts are put to bottom of each user's prompt list, winning ones are removed from their list and put in a second list of used up prompts. This also would allow users to maybe get a story written with their prompt that they would like to see used, and if it is popular among all users it will become part of a contest. Also maybe we can do a story can use one of three prompts we pick, if we want an easier contest for authors, or if we want tougher we do two or three of three prompts, just an idea there.

I think it might be interesting to try that approach.

Overall though, speaking only for myself, I am a lot slower at reading a story properly (proper means I write a comment and rate the story when I read it), I have forbidden myself from just reading a story without commenting and rating it, I am not sure if others do that too, but I do, so for me there is a bit more of a threshold of energy and time availability before I read a story.

Most readers have done the opposite, forbidding themselves to comment upon and rate the stories they read.

[Vela Nanashi]

Sadly that seems to be the case yes @Lucius, I know I am a bit weird for reversing that, but I do want to set a good example as one of the admins