Young Writers Society

I posted about this a while back, more or less, but now I have a bit of an update, as well as some questions.

To the mods- how many people do you have as staff/admin type people on YWS? I ask because right now I have two others to help me with my board (one of them being a member here), but I'm not really sure how many more I want. I'm not really expecting the board to get insanely popular like this one is. I don't really have the resources or experience in coding to make it anything like this in terms of...well, the board as a whole. Do you guys have a limit as to how many people on staff you have? When you first started the board, did you just let pretty much anyone sign up to be on staff/admin/etc, or did they have to wait a few months of being active before being able to do so?

How many staff-type positions do you have? (Do you mind if I use the same "terms" if I credited this place? o.O I'm not good at coming up with creative names for that stuff)

Additionally, does anyone have any ideas for any other sections I could have on the board? I'm still adding a crapload more on to it at the moment, but I mean like...I guess activity wise, other than things like writing discussion, books and authors, critiquing...different sections for various genres...writing excerpts, exercises, challenges, prompts...I'm going to see if I can create various groups on the board and, like here, let those groups have sections that only those groups can see, but I'm not sure if the board host does that or not.

I THINK that's it.

Oh, one more thing. If you (er...Nate, since I believe it's your board) are interested in affiliating with my board, let me know. I've all ready posted a link to YWS up on the web site, which can be found at http://www.freewebs.com/inspired-writers/, which is a temporary web site until I can figure out how to properly update the domain site (having issues with Dreamweaver).

So'm...yeah. I guess that's it for now. XD

There's a link to the staff in the general board navigation menu:

The YWS Staff

In all, there are 13 mods & admins for YWS. However, there is a job hierarchy on top of that. Below mods, you have junior mods. Then you also have instructors and greeters as well. For instructors and greeters, it's a designation reflecting your hard work in certain areas. Junior mods and mods are responsible for moderating, and admins are in charge of making sure the site runs smoothly.

I wouldn't worry about not knowing how to code. When I started YWS, I didn't know any PHP. But after adding lots of modifications here and there that I grabbed from phpbb.com, I began to learn it very well. There are now a lot of modifications to YWS that I made myself, although nothing major.

When the board first started, anyone was allowed to sign up, and I accepted anyone. That actually worked pretty well remarkably; only one mod was a dud, and that's only because he stopped coming to the site two days after he became a mod.

As for ideas for your own board, it all depends on what you're going for. When YWS first started, it was just a very simple site with about 15 forums to post different types of fiction & poetry, and just general chit chat. Since then, it's expanded a ton.

Sections for prompts & challenges only work if you want to make them work; that is, you have to keep at it. YWS used to do something similar, but it was too much to keep up with it.

Regarding development of YWS, I always had some general idea of where I wanted it to go and what I wanted it to look like, but nothing real. It was more like, "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

Hope that helps. Best thing really to do is see how other sites are organized, then try to take away their members! I credit YWS with the utter collapse of at least four sites, lol

Hi, sorry it took so long to reply.

Just had another question...I'm able to set the board up so that it can have sub-forums. Right now I have an "inspiration" section with 7 sections and almost all of those have sub-forums. Then I have "The Writer's Desk," which has 7 forums for discussion of different genres. And then the next section is going to be for "open writing," basically for those who don't mind posting their writing where it's easy to get to it. I plan on having a section of forums that'll be password protected for those who want to keep their writing excerpts private.

I'm just starting to feel like I may need to narrow it down a bit, but maybe not? o.O There's still quite a few more sections/forums I plan on adding on to it. Any suggestions?