jax is on the warpath, run while u still can
But seriously, I agree with you. But we shouldn't ban idea threads entirely, because some people do actually use them for their intended purpose. I've been talking to Jelly recently, and she has every intention of writing the story from her idea thread in the Lounge. It'd be like banning alcohol. It'd solve some problems, but it'd be unfair on the people who drink responsibly, and for enjoyment.
It's not really banning idea threads that I'm proposing. I mean, if you're legitimately looking for advice, that's what this forum is all about. It's mostly posting ideas to get them off your chest with no intention of actually writing them that I'm trying to think about curbing because, yeah, I kinda figured at least one person was doing that. *motions to Swampoleon* (But if everyone's doing that, yeah, I just want you all to know that that sort of thing pisses me off a little.)
There's also a possibility of funneling things into one thread -- like one big idea thread on which everyone could get advice about their story and not the finer details. The problem with this is that it could potentially get messy if we all use it at once, and besides that, I'd proposed something like this to Asty before, to which we agreed it'd be difficult to get people to realize the thread's there, especially with ten stickies already in this forum. (It's possible that we don't need to make this one a sticky, but it'd be convenient.) In the meantime, the rest of the forum could be reserved for specific questions (such as "I have this idea, but will this character work?" and "I'm working on this scene, but I don't know how to go from Point A to Point B, plz help") or the "look at this part and give me a mini-beta" sort of thing that's been going on in this thread now and then. Hell, we might even be able to do a
Little Details kind of thing if we could just realize that this forum can be used for a lot more than just idea thread after idea thread.
So, in short, I'm not proposing the banning of idea threads, particularly from authors who fully intend on actually writing the ideas they come up with. I just propose the limitation of the posting of idea threads from kids who have
no intention of doing anything with what they're coming up with -- possibly the funneling of those ideas from those kinds of posters into one larger thread so we can actually advise the people intending on writing and, well, answer questions that are a bit something more than, "Is this idea any good?" (And if we could succeed in doing that much, there's a possibility of being able to put all ideas in that thread, but the first experiment might only need to cover plot bunnies that are
attempts at attention-whoring wanting mild advice as well... like, well, yeah. *motions again*)
Maybe it's not my place to say this because I'm not the mod here, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it'd really be cool if we could clean up the forum, stop any abuse that's possibly happening, and use this place to its full potential. We're currently not quite doing that because all we're talking about is, "lol i has a new idea plz rate" and "lol idea iz gr8 cant wait 2 see u rite it."