Re: Intro to Glowfic
Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 3:50 pm
And possibly not have the more against joining a thread uninvited hidden in the definition of some words with conventional English definitions.
It is so good that this is happening!
Some thoughts:
- The given-in-parts, largely-historical definition of glowfic is good, but it would be nice to have a brief (bolded?) couple-of-sentence definition right at the very beginning. Something aimed at the 'clicked on the IRC and wants to know what on earth is going on' demographic, since that seems to exist, maybe. Like, along the lines of "Glowfic is a term for a genre of roleplay in which [brief explanation of templates] [brief list of major themes]". And then there can be all of the historical stuff and the explanation of roleplay and so forth; but it would be nice for new people to have some kind of peg to be hanging all of that on, rather than needing to read through multiple paragraphs before they know glowfic from an ice cream flavor.
- The document seems to be using the convention of capitalizing "glowfic." I find that a little odd, but I could see going either way on it; how do other people prefer it be used?
- In the "how to create a character on the Constellation" section, it might be helpful to mark some of the fields as (semi-)mandatory/strongly expected, and others as optional. Personally I would have found that very useful when I was just starting out, so I didn't have to try to figure out if I'd look super weird if I didn't have screennames for my characters, and did I really need nicknames, and so on.
- "Various terminology and slang" could perhaps be titled "glossary."
- If it were up to me, I'd separate "how to use the Constellation" from "what is glowfic" much more strongly. For instance, right now there's a "templates" section which explains what a template is and also how to create one on the Constellation; I'd rather have those two things as subparts of completely different sections. (Thus, for one thing, someone who was interested in reading but not writing glowfic could just read through the "what is glowfic" section and come out understanding what a template is, without also having to skim through the process for adding characters to a template on the Constellation.)
- I think it would be nice to have a section for "this sounds cool! how do I join?" This could perhaps include a link to the introduce-yourself thread on the forums, now that we have one; the information about the IRC; a suggestion that you have some characters, original or from some other work, that you're interested in playing as; and mention that you should talk to people and find a coauthor to start a thread, rather than just jumping into one where you weren't invited. (Maybe also some sort of loose template for authorthreads? I feel like I've seen a lot of people wanting to start one but being unsure about what to put in, and while obviously "whatever you want" is the actual answer, it might make people feel better to have a template to work from.)
- It might also be worth having a brief section on various community norm stuff? I feel more tentative about this -- for one thing, it requires working out explicitly what our norms are -- but it would also be nice to have as a new person, since from the outside it's not obvious that (e.g.) just showing up in someone else's thread and posting is wildly outside the norms, but just showing up in the IRC and going "so how about those elfthreads huh!" is totally normal and welcome. Could mention things like sidechannel etiquette, how we usually handle discussion of spoilers/triggery stuff, reassurance that new people are welcome even if it does seem like everyone already knows each other, etc. etc.