A few short side notes, but...
Whether we make said rules into a story or not is irrelevant: let's actually write them first. Until we get them down, practically nothing else can move forward.
Not that it matters or anything, but Bay's list (a quote of the spoiler tag in the first post) was actually a skeletal rendition of the actual rules thread in the main forum. Sure, it's a jumping off point, but the point's pretty much that we've already got the rules drawn up, basically. (As in, the majority of them actually make sense and are pretty much fine. We just need to figure out what's not needed anymore and what rules we'd like to add to them. Beyond that, we need to figure out if any of them need redefined, clarified, and/or dressed up so, you know, people actually read them and understand what they're trying to say.)
I've also come up with a definition for reviews. Ultimately, they should suggest that the author change something.
I don't know about this, personally. This might actually discourage a lot of people from participating in the forums because it's saying you can't say anything unless it's constructive criticism. Sometimes, readers might not find anything actually wrong with the story, and that's perfectly okay. Of course, this isn't to say that we should allow one-liner praises, but even just a paragraph saying short specifics about what you thought concerning a story's still an intelligent bit of thought that an author could respond to, right? Meanwhile, if we make it a rule that everyone has to leave concrit, we might just as easily get one-liners about how the grammar needs work without any explanation. Or, well, kids who don't feel like they want to review because they don't have anything to say.
Short of it is, all a review is, in my opinion, is feedback. It could be completely positive, so long as it says
something about the story. So, instead, perhaps we could just say that reviews need to talk about one or two specific points about the story. Anyone can say, "I really liked the part about (insert something here) because it (insert view here)," and that's not quite as intimidating, is it? Sure, we just need to discourage people from going, "omg great fic!!! cant wait for more!!!1," but that's really just as simple as saying, "It's completely okay if you just want to write a paragraph about a few specific bits of the chapter."
Beyond that, if we're aiming to get people to write substantial reviews (like, more than a couple of lines), that's probably just something we'll have to leave to experience and emulation -- as in, just letting the experienced reviewers set an example that everyone else follows.
In regards to bad grammar, I say just outright close the fic. Make decent grammar a rule, along with a link to a grammar checking website
like this one.
We'll have to define things like "decent grammar" as clearly as possible if we do something like this. Not turning it down or anything. I'm just saying if you make a rule that involves the word "decent," you'll need to be very specific because the word "decent" is a bit abstract itself. What if something's readable, but the author just doesn't get how to punctuate dialogue or when to use a comma? Both are pretty common errors that can breed like rabbits all over your chapter, and the giant sum of errors that result could just as easily be fixed if a reviewer came along and said politely, "Let me teach you how to use commas." ('Course, we also have grammar guides in the list Dagzar's compiling, but still.)
Or are you talking about the kinds of fics written by people who don't even care about spelling or proper punctuation? (Those usually end up closed anyway due to not matching the vaguely defined standards of the forum either way.)
Also, we'll want to be careful here, too. While, obviously, we'll want to shut down trollfics as quickly as possible, we also don't want to discourage young writers who just honestly don't know any better. How do we screen the kids who are willing to learn from the ones who aren't?
Short of it on that point is, sure, we want to step up the quality of the section, but we also want to define what quality actually is. What are the forum standards mentioned in the actual rules sticky? Do we have the reviewers enforce them by teaching them to the rest of the forum, or can we have a rule about them? How do we create a rule about them without driving people away? And so on and so forth.
Other than that, I've given it some thought, and I do like the idea of a condensed version as Breezy said. Perhaps a preservation of the old rules, with the redefinitions I've asked about above. (I could ask a hell of a lot more about the rules, but since standard's one of the larger vague issues with the other biggies being pretty much common sense, we could start with that.) If we
do end up doing a story, we could actually attach it in subsequent posts,
after the rules thread. I know
this doesn't answer the issue of stickies, either, but it might at least give the illusion that there's discussion going on that a newbie might want to read through.
Alternatively, we could scrap the story idea altogether and just do what SPPf does by keeping the thread unlocked so people can actually post questions about how the forums are run. As far as I can tell, people actually pay attention to the thread over there if there's a new post. 'Course, that's on top of what Breezy said about examples.
As for the question about what this thread is supposed to be about, it's actually just about the
general rules of the forum. Standard's one of them (like the rule that causes fics to get locked if they "don't meet forum standards"), and
that will definitely need a short but clear definition if we're actually going to keep it (as I've mentioned above). Other than that, yeah, we're not actually trying to come up with a grammar guide, writing guide, et cetera.
In fact, didn't we say that a general writing guide wouldn't be a good idea, guys? I mean, don't you remember what happened with the
last attempts at writing guides we had? >_> You know, the writing one that told people to abuse Microsoft Word's thesaurus and the grammar one that only covered commas and homophones? Besides, Dagzar's compiling a list of off-PC tools, including online spellcheckers and guides to grammar and writing. (Remember how we figured it'd be easier to just do something like that than come up with more stickies that people won't read to clutter up the forums, especially since we all seem to have differing ideas about what should be included in said guides?) If you have any links that
aren't the old ones on PC, drop them off in the main PMR thread.
