Hello there! We've seen interest in doing more writing based contests (which we would love to do!) so we're hoping to find ways to make that a good experience for everyone. Writing contests present a few difficulties that image based contests don't - particularly in that it is much faster and easier to skim through a bunch of images than it is to read the same number of writing snippets, much less full on stories - so we're looking for input into a few of those issues, particularly word limits, and how to handle judging.

Word limits: Realistically we're talking very very short stories. 300-500 word limits perhaps? Without knowing how many people will take part in a contest it's hard to set a higher limit right off the bat, but perhaps that could be an option later on.

Judging: We could have staff do the initial judging, followed by users voting on the top staff picks, or we would be happy to hear other suggestions! Our main concern here is ensuring that all submissions are given a fair chance to be read and voted for, rather than have people read the first 10 and then never come back to read the rest of the submissions.

Content: We're considering asking users to keep writing submissions more on the PG side rather than PG-13 to help the content be as reader friendly as possible for all users and hopefully preemptively avoid any issues with stories straying into R-rated territory. Thoughts?

Feel free to ping any groups that you think might be interested in joining the discussion!

I'm thinking of the PG rating as more of a "if in doubt, err on the side of caution" rather than a hard guideline. Which is frustratingly squishy as far as rules go I realize, but hoping that will be enough to keep things at a reasonable content level. ;)

A rating system could be an option! And I appreciate your point about randomizing for equal viewership - I'm not entirely sure how previous contests have handled the randomized displays, but it'd certainly be something to look into. Thanks for the input!

500 hundred definitely felt on the long side to me as well, but I didn't want to scare people off by cutting things back too drastically right off the bat, haha. There's also a bit of a balance - something short like that two sentence story (which was great btw!) is also likely to lead to a lot more submissions than a longer contest I suspect. Which isn't a bad thing! Just another consideration. I'm hoping that we'll be able to run a number of different writing based contests in the future though and would love to include some super short ones for sure. ❤

Thanks for that link! It does a great job of showing how much you can fit into a story that length and it's nice to see people comfortable with shorter word counts.

I feel suspiciously like you've been reading my notes...;)

One or two errors shouldn't be an issue, but it is important that entries be readable and easily understood.

Good point about length and those items are great examples. Item descriptions are definitely on the contest idea list!

We won't be using contests for subetapedia entries, but we would love to encourage more NPC fan fiction! How did Saggitarious' first dragon hunt go? How did Jules and Garret's first meeting go? What were Qazim and Sephora like as children? Gossipers throughout Subeta would love to know! Or at least speculate. ;)

I love the idea of rotating flavor text for shops and areas - will definitely be adding that to the list!

Forum titles would definitely be a prize option. Open to suggestions if you've got ideas! ;) And that's a good point about poems avoiding the giant text block issues. Thanks for mentioning that!