I'd like to see this official (since I've been meaning to start something like this, but apparently someone is stealing my thoughts still).
Your dreams are tasty. :(
On a serious note, woot! \o/ In that case, I think we'd only need one for completing the challenge (which kinda makes it easy on Mizan, who has thankfully volunteered to be an awesome graphics monkey). Which means we now have to go through the hard part: figuring out what defines the challenge.
Speaking of which...
Perhaps, instead of one review a day, we make it a monthly goal. Like 40 reviews for the month.
Or, just do it the way Farla's NaReWriMo did, and give 14,000 words worth of reviews before the month is done. (That's 500 words a day, BTW. The original goal was 50,000 words, but I don't think we'll be able to do that much, given just the volume of stories here.)
Trying to review every fic on the first page is pretty much like a NaReWriMo anyway.
Side note: Yes, the reason why Farla set the word count at 50k is because it's the reviewing equivalent of
NaNoWriMo.
With that being said, lowering the count to about 500 words a day might actually be making the goal
harder than just a review a day. The reason why I say this is because a review doesn't have to be pages upon pages long; it just has to be at least a paragraph in length. (Paragraph because you can usually point out specific details and comment on them within that amount of space.) That might be a minimum of 100 words. (Comparison FTW: This entire paragraph is 198 words long. You can definitely cover specific details
and everything you'd like to say about them in the same amount of space, and that would still be considered a review. Sometimes, those kinds of reviews might even be
better than full-on, rip-apart-a-story-line-by-line crits, particularly if the reviewer knows what they're talking about and can say it concisely.) That means you're done with one story in roughly 100 words, but you'll still have to figure out what to do with the other 400. Or, if you decide to only do one review that day or skip a day, that means the next day, you might be looking at 900 to 1000 words.
On the other hand, it
does also make this a real
challenge because we're being pushed to write a little more than just a paragraph for each story, even those that might not elicit a wordy response from us. It's certainly not the kind of challenge that requires us to write 1786. (Roughly the number of words you'd need to write 50k in twenty-eight days. Doing this in a 31-day month like Farla would require roughly 1613, by the by.) However, it's still a bit harder of a goal to make than simply one review a month, and that might make the marathon a little more interesting. Not to mention it would improve some of our reviewing skills because we're forced to look over work in a short amount of time and come up with more to say about each.
Of course, whether or not people would have the time to write 500 words a day is questionable. (This is why the original proposal just left it at one review a day, rather than a specific daily word count.) Hence, I'm just putting both sides of the argument up and letting other people talk about it. Would a word count make this more appealing or less? Same thing with a higher review count than just twenty-eight. (Remember: You don't have to stop at twenty-eight reviews, too.)
I think I will be more apt to join if people actually take advice. I love giving advice--I really do. But I feel like people do not put in the work that they should after the review is given. You can see many of the same mistakes within their stories the chapter after. People just doesn't take the time to edit their work if a mistake is in it. I guess it just bothers me that people would rather quit their work than revise. At any rate, I will try to review more for the sake of the site.
I love it when authors just don't address your review at all.
I could name names, but... :/
However, I do agree with Bay. In addition, I'd just like to add that there's really only so much you can do for an author. At most, you can discuss your reasoning for why you said what you did about their story, but in the end, you just can't force them to take your advice. If they're rude about it or completely ignore you, you can always just walk away and spend time reviewing someone else who's more open to suggestions. (And trust me. On PC, there's plenty of people who are.)
The fun thing about exchanges where the author is resistant to concrit? It serves as advertisement in itself if you're patient. Other members of the board might look at your behavior and decide to ask you to review, and other reviewers might look at the author and realize they're not worth anyone's time. So, if you encounter a reviewer who's seriously egotistical enough to put up some resistance to fixing up his or her work, it's actually not that much of a bad thing.
Tl;dr, sure, we might not be able to force people to listen to us, but there's people out there who will. We shouldn't let ourselves get bogged down by the silly folk.
