Young Writers Society

I've gotten a few questions regarding this, and I'm sure many others are wondering as well; that is, when will literary works cost 150 points again?

Starting on Saturday, literary works will no longer cost 500 points per piece, although this may happen sooner if the number of works in the Green Room drops to 20 before then.

However, the cost will not drop back to 150, and may not ever again. Instead, the cost will drop to 300, which is equivalent to two reviews in the Green Room (three reviews otherwise). New members will continue to get one freebie. The cost will also vary based on how much is in the Green Room, although please feel free to leave feedback regarding this.

Personally, this is something I really don't like doing; it's like using a sledgehammer to solve a stubborn nail. But despite the efforts of a lot of people (The Green Knights, the Review Tourney, Review Days, etc.), we were having a lot of stuff go unreviewed - by the end of April, there were over 300 works in the Green Room! Ideally, that number should never go higher than 25 (that's equivalent to roughly one day of literary submissions).

On the bright side, there may be a couple days next week when the cost of posting a new literary work drops to 0! The next Review Day is May 26, and that means we need lots of stuff to review. At the moment, only 10 new literary works are being posted per day due to the high cost. This is helping the Green Room to heal, but it also means that there may not be a lot of stuff to review on Review Day. If this happens, I'll announce the exact day(s) on Saturday.

Blocked all ads for gaming related sites. Some of these ads were displaying inappropriate images with even more inappropriate text accompanying them.

If you see an inappropriate ad, please report it along with the name of the site advertised in the ad. Simply saying, "I didn't like this ad," doesn't help me at all if you didn't write down what the ad was advertising.

Also renamed the "In The News" forum. It's been around since 2005, but I've been pretty much the only person to use it to post news articles. And since January, it's been only Squills. So, it's now the "Squills - The YWS News" forum. Feel free to post any news topic related to writing or books.

A few small changes.

The first small change, though significant, is that mentions now work in the forums and storybooks. I'm hoping this will lead to more activity in both areas, and it should also help greatly in a number of situations.

The second change is that everyone is now following the YWS Club. If you wish to unsubscribe, though, you can do that. However, I wanted to do this because it's very difficult to communicate something to the entire site at the moment. So since the best place to post something that people will read is on the People tab, I decided to make everyone a follower of the YWS Club. This way when there's an announcement, I can post it there.

The third change is for new members only; that is, all new members now automatically follow the Big Brother account. I'd like to use the Big Brother account for posting helpful tips on using YWS, and this should help new members greatly.

Attention club administrators! You can now send newsletters to the subscribers of the club! The newsletter is sent via PM.

What I'm really hoping to see with this is an increase in clubs that are YWS-centric. For example, a YWS poetry club that sends out a newsletter once a week about all the must-read poems from the past week.

With everyone now subscribed to the YWS Club, I failed to foresee one thing: everyone now gets a notification whenever someone makes a wall post there. I haven't heard any complaints about this yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some members found this annoying.

Personally, I love it. A lot of new members have been using it as a way to connect to other members, and it makes the site feel a little smaller than it did before.

But, it could also be abused. What happens when some troll inevitably spams the YWS Club wall? It's bound to happen at some point, although it may happen so rarely that it's hardly worth talking about (and it hasn't happened yet).

So I'm asking for thoughts. I can tune the code in such a way as to turn off notifications for just the YWS Club. Is this something people would prefer, or is the current "unsubscribe" method okay?

Is there an option so we get notifications if
- A member of YWS staff posts on the wall/forum
- Someone replies to our post
- Someone mentions us

..But not for every post on the wall/forum?

I wouldn't like to unsubscribe, because I like how it connects us all and makes your job of informing us of stuff easier..but then again, I don't really need to see people "checking in" or noticing they're in the club or something. I mean, it's great to have everyone there, but not like it's really important to see each of them saying hi xP

On the other hand, I'm aware that the mods/admins/you maybe won't be the only ones posting something important.. But I'm sure I'll be checking out the club every now and then even if I get no notifications, while I might eventually get annoyed with getting a bunch of them, enough to decide to leave.

That might only be me, but I felt like sharing concerns anyway c:

I think that the YWS club is a good way to get a point across incredibly easy. There hasn't been people who've done that yet, but just to make sure, maybe make a post every week asking everyone to please not be trolls.

I don't think you should change it. It's fine as it is.

Made a couple changes for the currently ongoing Review Day.

The first change is an update to an old, previously neglected feature: Review Day Team Statistics. New members will love its sense of style and easy statistical accessibility. Old members will love the addition of the line chart.

The second change is to All Literary and the Green Room. All Literary is now only showing works submitted since April 1, and it's sorting the works by number of reviews (works are normally sorted by date submitted). I should've done this earlier, but it's to prevent the most recently submitted works from getting lots of reviews while older works get neglected.

For the Green Room, it normally only shows works from the past 30 days. It is now showing all works submitted since April 1 that have 0 reviews or just 1.

An update on YWS Club notifications: since only two people responded, I'm guessing it's not that much of an issue. I also still haven't got any complaints about it. Plus, I really do like it. It's great seeing it used as a way for new members to connect to one another.

I think what I may do, though, is have the YWS Club notifications continue to show up on the notifications page, but they won't be counted as new notifications. That way, the "X Notifications" link won't be glowing white every time someone makes a wall post there.

The extra notifications I get from the YWS Club are no bother.

It'd be a great way to do broadcasts as well ^^. EVERYBODY would hear about it.

I wonder if it might help with the SB death problem. I mean, being able to advertise SB's.

*shrugs

*I love the graph thing.

It's with great regret that I've turned off all notifications for the YWS Club. This is a permanent change, and I think many people will understand why without me going into the details. This change does not affect club announcements.

One thing I will be doing, though, is creating a club for new members only. What I liked about the YWS Club notifications is that it allowed more opportunity for new members to connect with others on the site. A "new members island" type club will achieve this without 30,000 registered members receiving notifications for every comment and discussion post.

I understand why you turned it off, and I didn't mind it until people started posting mindlessly in the forums. I don't think it's bad if you keep the notifications on for the Wall, just not the forums.

Is the quick reply going to return?

SparkOfDoubt wrote:Is the quick reply going to return?

It's right here!

One big update and a few smaller changes.

The big update is the new storybooks feature, which I hope people like! So far, there has not been much feedback back on it, so I'm worried about that.

The storybooks feature started more or less on a whim. I've been wanting to do something there for a very long time, but just never did. Finally this past weekend, I decided I'd go ahead and start implementing some small changes. Those small changes quickly turned into big changes, and what I thought would be a three-hour project turned into a multi-day project. I think the result is well-worth it though.

The other changes all have to do with the sidebar area, which is very much under-utilized. I'm moving all action buttons (ex. "Post a new topic") to the left hand side, where I think most people expect to see them when first visiting the site. That frees up some space.

In the storybooks area, that extra space allows storybook managers to take advantage of the sidebar area. However, the area most people will notice changes to the sidebar is in the forums and storybooks main tabs.

There, you'll see "New Posts" and "Hot topics." A very small change, but I'm hoping it'll boost activity in the forums in particular. Moreover, the "View New Posts" button should be a little more prominent. That page was once second only to the index page, but in the past year, it's plummeted. That, in turn, may explain why the forums aren't as popular as they used to be despite rising activity.

In any case, that's it for this week. I'm off to New York for this weekend, but expect more updates next week. In particular, expect a lot more trophies coming down the pipeline (useful for people like me who have no trophies!).