It occurs to me we have a couple of semi-related things going on here;
1. The time between sending a message to the RAAC moderator,
the time it takes to moderate it and post it to the
news group, and the subsequent entry into the Archive, and...
2. Fanfic contests that use the RAAC or Fanfic Archive as the entry
and timestamp for said contests.
For the first topic, I'd like to thank the moderators for the work
they
do. They are unpaid volunteers, tend to get a lot of guff for what they
do,
which is to keep RAAC filled with stories and free of spam. I had planned
to become a moderator myself but decided against it because:
1. Deep down I'm a basicaly lazy bugger. and
2. Becase my taste runs to 6 sigma in the direction of 'WAFF', I
would
have have rejected a lot of stories, sending authors nasty notes
about killing off beloved characters. (HEY! STOP IT.)
RAAC has been singularly free of SPAM since is was created (about 4
years
ago) and thats a really good thing.
That said, the Engineer in me also wonders if there isn't a way to
provide
a similar service to the readers of RAAC without having to have it manualy
moderated. I'm just a hardware guy, but it occurs that an automated system
might work like this:
1. The author mails or posts the story to an account that has a
script
running, and the author recieves back an acknowledgment message
containing a serialized key, and a form message that the author
uses to build up the RAAC style Subject line.
This will trip up 99.99 % of all spammers since they generaly do
not have a valid return address, and would not receive the ack.
2. The author sends back the filled-in form with the key, releasing
the
story from escrow. The script the posts it the the newsgroup.
I can identify a some of problems with this:
1. A really determined spammer could get through.
2. Badly formated stories could get through (with non ascii chars)
3. Blatantly offensive stories (for example stories containing child
porn) might be posted to the newsgroup.
As for spammers, I suspect that as long as this scheme is limited to
RAAC
it would be just too much trouble for them to bother with one little
group,
and anyway the rest of RAAx is unmoderated.
As for formating, It's our job as authors to do a good job, and the
script
could do a simple format search for number of chars per line and other
errors)
As for yucky stories, I don't have an answer, except to say that there
are
16,000+ other groups where that might go, some of them specificaly for
that
sort of thing. I suppose it might even be possible to set up a cancel
script
that would let a few people cancel articals that are out of the charter
for
the group.
Now, on to Contests.
I like having my stories in the contests, because then more people
read
them. I must admit that were it not for the ability to publish and share
stories on the internet I would not write them. I know this flies in the
face
some opinion in the group about 'why we write', but the fact remians that
the
only reason I write fanfics is to share. (Hen, ne?)
Because of the vagarities of moderation, a [www] notice for "Black"
was posted some 20+ days before the end of the second quarter, but it did
not get posted to RAAC untill a week into the next quarter, and it was
several days after that before it was archived.
Frankly, I have no problem with that much time in the moderation
queue,
(They are volunteers, for cripes sake!) but it did mean that the 400+
people who followed the [www] notice to my website before the end of
the quarter got nearly 4 months to forget the story before they
had the chance to vote on it, vs some stories that were submitted weeks
later and made the cut. (Grrr.)
Anyway, since I've plotted a tecnological scheme for a self moderating
newsgroup, Here's my idea on contests.
One way to solve this is to ask the authors to 'enter' their
stories into the contest (by emailing them directly to the contest
itself,)
and take the RAAC and archive out of the loop.
My guess is that the majority of fanfic readers now get their fix
through the web, rather than through news or ftp. While it may be an
advantage
(in the contest) to have a story on RAAC, it should really be up to the
author to choose if they want their story in a contest.
This lets an author choose which story (If they wrote several) to
submit,
and it lets "anonymous" authors submit stories excluded by the rules of
RAAC.
(Hey, Doughboy!) and it lets an author choose whether they take part at
all.
One other advantage of this is that the author could be asked to write
a
short spoiler-free description of the story, much like the movie listings
in the TV guide. This would aid the reader-voter to remeber which stories
they really liked. (I, for one, have a hard time remembering the names of
stories, even ones I've really liked.)
Anyway, enough.
What do you think?
J.
______________________________________________________________________
Joseph Palmer | - The View from Here -
CEO - Video Storage Systems | My observations from Silicon Valley
http://www.VideoS2.com | http://www.best.com/~jpalmer/view/
view.shtml
"Solutions for Real Media" | Personal Web site: http://www.best.com/
~jpalmer