Are challenges too much to read?

That makes sense to me. In any case, this is the way the library does it, and i am very happy with that.


I for one hope that you reconsider and continue the challenges into the future. Think of it like this, if people weren't interested in the Library and the challenges, if it didn't catch people's attention, no one would bother to complain. No doubt others would run things a bit differently -- they are always free to start their own sites.

-Don L.

In my opinion, a handful of complaints is a handful too many complaints.

There are too many people on site to make a Challenge suitable for everyone. The rules are set out before the Challenge opens, so people being people can make their own choice, follow the rules or not but there is no need to post their personal preferences on the Forum about how a Challenge should change, particularly when a Challenge is on-going. The Challenges are made up by Admin and rightly so, the members would spend years trying to decide what the rules and guidelines should be and there would never be a Challenge at all.

NJRICK, I liked the challenge you put out there on getting some of the older stories read, that was great. Did you notice not one person on site wanted to change a thing,,,why not...because it was fun and made people read stories and comment if they wanted. It was work and many went about finding those stories.

The current Challenge is the same thing, it is work and people can chose to do it or not, but please no one complain about it, it spoils the fun. Just one Challenge I would like to see no whining or whatever you chose to call it about the voting, too many stories, not validated, the genre of the stories one may stumble upon, the size of the stories are too long or too short etc etc. I may have been guilty of this type of thing in the past but it is time to move on and get back to having fun.

CS

Just ignore the complaints. The challenges are a good thing. People will vote--or not. So what? I think by this time most of the issues have been discussed and discarded or dealt with so the model is pretty much fixed in its present form and it works for what it is. If you think that 94 stories is too many then don't read them all. But what I do is scan them quickly and assign a provisional vote based on first impression. Later I'll go back and look at the ones I flagged. At least this way, they'll all eventually get votes.

Statistical analysis taking up all your time perhaps, NJR?

I'm doing pretty much the same as Rollin. Speed reading them, and assigning a vote to those I like. Shortly I shall return to the voted ones, read carefully, confirm my vote and comment.

While I understand Februs' and PinkAngel's frustration, and the point of my original post was (1) to share a to me interesting odd fact about the reading of the challenges and (2) to query the argument that there was too much to read, since the great majority of the reading going on was not of challenge entries, I do think it would be a pity either to call a halt to the challenges or to make people feel uncomfortable for suggesting changes to them. As far as I can see most of the posts we're calling complaints aren't complaints. They're suggestions for changing something backed by an explanation of what the poster thinks can be fixed thereby. A lively if rather long debate ensues. Generally at least half the commenters oppose the change. Occasionally, presumably, someone comes up with an idea which is practical and popular.

I'd be very sorry if people felt deterred from making suggestions. Perhaps we should all, while drafting suggestions, check the tone of what we've written, but compared to most other sites - spanking or otherwise - this one is civilised and polite.

Not every expression or a certain opinion is a complaint. BH asked if challenges are too much to read and I answered honoustly: "Yes, with more and more authors participating it is too much to read for me". That is not a complaint, it's just a feedback and I can't see why it is spoiling anybodies fun.

I love the site, I love the challenges and I'm the last one who ist not pretty much appreciating all the work Februs, Flopsy, PA and the validators are putting in this site. But sometimes even successfull things could bear changes, especially if one item is so successfull and steadily increasing as this library. The origin of the challenges was to motivate authors to write new stories. This goal is more than successfully achieved as we see in the increasing number of entries. Now it might be the time to think about methods to involve more readers into the challenge - if this is what authors want. It's perfectly okay for me, if the goal remains on accumulating as many stories as possible and leave the voting to the validators and a few other active authors, especially as I think that my votes and the few meaningless comments I leave on the stories are not worth bothering at all.

Apart from enjoying the stories and having fun by participating in the voting process I regard the challenges quite seriously. I know from many authors that they like to get comments and want to know how their stories are perceived. Taking part in the voting is therefore a way to say thank you to all the authors and honour their efforts, even if it means to read a dozen stories, which I normally wouldn't read. It just has to be in a healthy balance.

Of course, I could just stop reading the challenge entries without giving any comment on the forum. But if all readers would do it this way, the admins would have no idea about probably existing problems. Don't know if this would be more appreciated.


I'm happy with the extension of the voting period and will do my best to read all entries. For future challenges it might be interesting to see, how many people are actively voting, probably defined by votes on at least one quarter of all stories, or the amount of stories read during the challenge-period. It might be that this number is also increasing from challenge to challenge and would mean that the increasing number of stories is not an important problem. That is something which can be proved easily by facts.

The very bottom line is this:

If there is no limit on the word count, if authors are allowed more than one story, if a lot people enjoy the challenge and write stories such as the one we're now voting and reading, then there are going to be a lot of stories and a lot of words. Rollin and a few others have the right idea with this scenario. "Scan through them and see which ones you'd like to read."

Even at the 2500 word limit this time, there are still 94 stories to read. There aren't 2500 for each story, so there are a bit less than the 235,000 words to read for all the stories if there were. That's like two full blown novels. So, they either read, write, and vote, or not.

What I did notice this time around is that the authors decided to try their hand at M/F - M/f stories. There are an awful lot of them. This leads me to believe that each author is trying real hard to either win, place, or show. This challenge has definitely been taken seriously. I threw my two cents in earlier, but I honestly don't care either way how the challenges work. This is the best site of its kind on the Internet, and the admins are putting it all on the line for free. With all that's happened to me and my wife in the past few weeks, I can still sit and ease my mind a bit because of them.

Just a quick note:

If people don't want to write stories for challenges, then they shouldn't write them.
If people don't want to read the story challenge stories then they shouldn't read them.
If people want to read a few entries but not all of them then they should only read a few entries.
If people don't feel comfortable in voting for the stories, then they shouldn't vote.

To suggest something along the lines of "I don't want to be involved in a story challenge so the site should stop hosting them" goes beyond that. No one forces anyone to participate in those challenges. If people ignore the "click here for challenges" picture then they don't impact on the rest of the site.


Now something in favour in of the challenges on general principles:
I know that stories have been written for the challenges that otherwise would not have been written. I know this because I've entered the letter contest and the summer vacation and wrote stories that I otherwise wouldn't have written - and I must assume that other writers were similarly motivated by various challenges to write new stories. That means dozens, scores, perhaps even hundreds of stories are part of the library that otherwise would not exist.

That's a good thing - and for that reason alone I'd love to see the contests continue. Even though I don't always have the time to enter one or even to read all of the stories, the contests add to the board.

Goodgulf

CS, I hope you don't decide to throw your towel in the LSF ring. You and your stories I'm sure would be missed greatly. At least by me they would.