Young Writers Society

Dunno if this is really the best section to post this, but I wasn't sure what other section it would really fit in.

I run a message board for writers, and one of the things some of the members and myself are concerned about is the fact that people are posting their writing, but not really critiquing anything. The poems that've been posted are getting more critiques than the short stories/chapters that've been posted.

As a member of a message board where people post their stories and poems for critiques and the poems seem to be getting more critiques than the stories, what would you see as a fair method of getting people to critique the stories? There's all ready a rule of "for every story or poem you post, you must critique at least TWO other stories or poems," which is similar to what YWS has for a rule. Unfortunately, it's not working very well because people will critique another person's writing but the favor hasn't be returned. Forcing them in to critiquing will just turn current and any future members away.

I need a fair method of making sure people give critiques without forcing them in to it, and unfortunately I can't think of anything that would really work. One thing I'm going to do is have the two people in charge of getting critiques to people send PMs to any new members giving links to whatever posts we make listing the things that haven't gotten any/have gotten few critiques so that they know what needs to be critiqued once they've joined, but I don't know what else to do beyond that. Anyone have any ideas? Is anyone a member of another message board where something works fairly well without having to force people in to critiquing?

I've all ready been told by one person that they'd be turned off if they were forced to critique someone else's writing based on another person's schedule, because of not having a lot of time in real life to do so, so I don't want to do anything that would force them in to critiquing something when they don't have the time. Another thing I'm going to do is make it so that each week a post is made listing the stories/poems with hardly any or no critiques at all until they get critiques, and hopefully that will help. I had all ready been basically doing that, but it hasn't worked very well for the most part.

Hmm. Do you have an awards system perhaps? I think that the points and stars systems on YWS work really well so maybe you could set up something like that to encourage people to critique. I'm sure Nate wouldn't mind you borrowing the idea.

You're never going to be able to force people to critique. The only way is to give incentives for the act of critiquing. Here at YWS we have points -- you can win the points contest, and gain repute -- and stars. The more you critique the more sparkly you get! Yes, so basically, the idea is to encourage your members -- don't run around chastising them for lack of effort, but instead reward those who DO critique and eventually people might see the benefits of critiquing

Kitty- we don't have one right now, but I don't have the resources (it's a free message board, so unlike the host that YWS is on, I can't have it do things like add points or stars or whatever whenever someone makes a review in a certain section) to be able to input a reward system like the one YWS has. I really don't know what kind of a reward I could give, other than like...I don't know, an icon I could make, but honestly that would probably be a bigger pain in the butt than it should be...especially if we ever get over, say, 100 members.