This has already taken too long to write. Here's what I have, we can worry about improving it later.

You're right; drawing attention to the reason I started this site would be overall a good thing.

Not so much why you started the site as why visitors should start accounts and come back. They will care more for what's in it for them than what's in it for you.

A good, well-written mission statement has multiple benefits:

• It gives the visitor a basis for a quick decision as to why this site is "for them".
• If it includes a lot of the words that people are likely to be using in a search it improves your chances of getting visitors from search engines. (This also applies to the FAQ, the How-to/help page, and section descriptor pages.)

What do you think of something like this? (I have no experience writing mission statments...)

Nor do I. What writing experience I have is pedagogical or technical.

However, IMHO, any Mission Statement that doesn't actively drive visitors away and that is consistent with your vision is better than none. You can always rewrite it at your leisure.

Write On is intended to be a place where writers of all genres can discuss the art and craft of writing, both what is common between genres and what is specific to a genre.

How about

Write On is a place where writers of all genres can discuss the art and craft of writing. We discuss both what is common to all genres and stuff that is genre-specific (presently SF/F, though other genres can be added). For more info on this, see How to use this site.

You might further add something like

This is not a place to post stories for critique, there are other places for that. We do, however, have a section (excercises) for short story fragments that demonstrate a particular technique.

And

Long discussions are encouraged, not a rush to get in comments fast while people are still noticing the article. We have several features to facilitate this end.

Changed from "Long conversations are encouraged, ..." to improve search engine hits.

The key words I think we should hit are (at least): writing, writer, writers, discussion(s), forum.

In the course of writing this comment, I reread the How to use ... section. You might wish to move some things from there to the FAQ, making the How-to more tutorial in style. While you are at it, internal labels in the How-to might be a good idea so that specific pieces could be referenced from the Mission Statement and FAQ.

May be more a matter of available RAM than CPU speed.

Oh, I know very well it's a matter of RAM. I have 64Mb RAM, 128Mb swap partition, and some stupidly big swap file. All of my RAM and the same amount of my swap partition is in use. (I'm not sure why I bothered with the swap file, it's not only stupidly big, it's stupidly slow.) Unfortunately, my RAM is EDO, 72 pin. The expensive stuff, as you noted. Bleagh. The 233 I may be switching it to takes the newer (and much cheaper) RAM, so I'll beef that up as much as I can.

If you are running X (which I assume you are) try running the program "kpm" (KDE Process Manager).

Does that require KDE to be running? Because I don't run KDE. (Nor Gnome, before you ask. Both of them take up resources I just don't have.) I do have the qt libs though, so it might run.

Another cause of the problem might be Scoop, which is written in PERL and uses MySQL. IMHO, PhP and PostGreSQL are a much better combo.

*chuckle* Yes, I know. mod_perl is faster than just perl, at least, otherwise your connection would time out before my computer could finish assembling the page. I rather like scoop, though, the format and how it works and everything. (I'm even helping out with documentation, because I don't know enough perl to help with the code.) They're working on getting it working with postgresql as well. That particular topic has come up many, many times on the scoop mailing lists.

BTW, there are several broken local links on your Linux page.

Which linux page?

I was wondering why I kept seeing slashdot in my referer logs...
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

This particular discussion (inevitably) will have some aspects of "airing one's dirty linen". For that reason, I don't think it should be front page. Not something that new vistitors (or repeats) should see without looking for it.

The main reason I asked for a "meta" section was to have a place to have this discussion that wouldn't clutter anything up.
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Someday I may have a .sig :)
[ Parent ]

Warning, you might find this one unconfortable.

I think that since BLLL's story has two votes now, I'll put it up.

Only problem with that is that it is an offer of services. That would be fine except that he has shown no evidence of being around since he submitted the offer and has not left a public mailing address. I notice BTW that he used the email "bluelavalamplight@iVillage.com" on Toasted Cheese.

IMHO BLLL is the best prospect among all those that created accounts for an active, regular participant. One can only speculate on why he has not been back.

• He lost the URL again as he did between his first and second visits.
• He was put off by your comment:

  This site is geared towards discussion - that's why pretty much all of the stories I've posted so far have presented a question of some sort. Can you add a discussion factor to this?

  I will have more to say about this comment later. This was part of the "dirty linen" I mentioned. I wouldn't bring it up at all except for the possibility that it might have hurt the viability of the site.

What, you didn't see how the first exercise I posted was set up? ;-)

Yes, I did. I was suggesting an alternative that you might not (or might, of course) have thought of, along with my opinion of the merits of each.

Exercise 'assignment' is posted as an article, most likely voted to section, then people would actually do the exercises as comments in reply to the article. Other people could comment on the exercises as replies to the comment.

Right. Then where is the place to comment on the value and appropriateness of the exercise, as I wished to do?

One need not be logged in to do an exercise.

Right again. My poor wording. I was referring to what you called the exercise "assignemt". Nice phrasing, BTW, I wouldn't have thought of it.

I intend to allow anonymous posting as long as I can (ie, until it becomes a big problem), to get people participating without needing to make the commitment of creating an account.

OK, that settles it, then. There will be no further comment on the subject from me. (At least, not for a while :)

It's probably not obvious that I'm quite willing to add genre sections as needed, but I am.

You have made it quite plain. The genre suggestion I made was in conjunction with the exercise suggestion I made. It seemed to me that excercises might be appropriately posted to the genre section that matched. SF exercises in the SF section, General writing excercises in a General Fiction, etc. IOTW, make exercises a topic, rather than a section.

BTW, I am all in favor of exercises. $Deity knows I need them, starting with the most basic. Have never done a creative writing course in my life. Had a composition course in HS (over four decades ago) and another short one in Community College about a decade ago.

This site actually started out as a F/SF site, but a couple of people (who only showed up a couple of times, unfortunately) requested other genres, so I changed it into an all-genre site.

Kind of got that impression from things you said here and there. However, before one can write SF, one must have at least the basics of writing Fiction.

We definitely seem to have had a problem with terminology.

I think that there was some misunderstanding about what exactly we were talking about (at least, I know there was on my end) because the word 'exercises' can be used both to describe the description of what the writer should do and what the writer actually produces.

Having had a few minutes to think about it between reading your comment and this reply, I think that we were both using secondary meanings.

I tried to justify my (fuzzy, foggy) reasoning for the way I used the word and can only justify it based on convenience and (my opinion) of common usage. Same goes for your usage, based on your understanding of common usage. I submit my careful reasoning on what I now consider correct usage.

• Consider a gym class. Coach says, "Do five sit-ups." Student does them. No immediately visible result.
• Now consider a math class. Teacher says, "Solve these equations." Student does. Result: solved equations.
• Or a carpentry class. Teacher says, "Cut a two foot piece off this board." Student cuts board. Result: One two-foot (how accurate depends on the student) and a piece of "scrap".

In each of these cases, are the teachers words the exercise? Not in my opinion. Are the results the exercise? Again, not in my (current) opinion. So what is the real "exercise"? The student doing what is told. Same when the exercise is creative writing and the result is some words on paper (or on screen or in a file). Specifying/describing/assigning what is to be done are not the exercise. The words on paper are not the exercise. The actual doingness by the student is the exercise. As in many other cases, common usage is sloppy usage.

That said, I'll accept your usage

I think from here on I'll use the 'exercise' for the description of what the writer should do and 'response' for what the writer produces.

OK, I understand this as posting exercises to the section Exercise/Meta and responses as articles.

Right

Argument for separate exercises and responses:

The site doesn't get cluttered up with old, talked out exercises that don't really contribute anything but remain attached to the original submission.

The site doesn't get cluttered up with old, talked out responses that don't really contribute anything but remain attached to the original exercise.

I'd think that the site would be more cluttered with all those articles.

I was referring to visible clutter. Once attached to an article, comments remain attached forever. Articles, themselves, however, get pushed out of sight by newer articles. They are still there, just not so visible. The same is not true of comments. Further, there is no easy way provided to download just one thread. I still hold that navigation would be easier with separate "exercises"/responses. Just think, suppose there are a few popular exercises after a while. Would you want 100 separate responses, each with maybe 50 .. 100 or more comments attached to an article? How about 500? Several thousand?

Unless you intend that articles will be discussed in the submission queue and then mostly dropped. I don't think this is a good idea.

That was part of my thought, yes. On further consideration, I am inclined to agree with you.

For one thing, the submission queue is not designed for following discussions; there is no indication of how many comments there are attached to an article. For another thing, a discussion that the author of a mediocre response is finding tremendously helpful in improving his writing could get cut off when the article is dropped because it is not of high enough quality to be posted.

Both good points, though it was my thought that uniqueness and commentary be criteria for acceptance rather than excellence of execution of the exercise. I would certainly expect a horrible but uncommon response to be voted in, at the same time being torn to pieces by the commentary. I made some reference to that in the original post.

I also disagree with your assertion that 'old, talked out exercises' contribute nothing to the site.

I made no such assertion. You are seeing an inference where I intended a juxtaposition. My statement could be made more formally as follows: "There will probably exist responses that don't really contribute anything once they have been talked out. It is desirable that these (if they exist) not clutter up the site.

The people who did the discussion probably won't return to it, true; however a new visitor could find it very helpful to see a discussion of what was good, bad, or ugly about an example, and why.

Agreed. I would expect (at least some) such stellar examples to be voted in, whether good, bad, or ugly, or beautiful. I even expect that there will be some examples of beautiful prose that don't come close to fulfilling the exercise. Further, the most recent ones would be the most visible.

Argument for responses as comments:

I agree with both points.

Not unexpected, since they were my statement of my understanding of your position.

Also, I would add that responses can be found all in one place, to read (or ignore) as the reader prefers.

As stated above, am not at all sure that this is an argument for, if that means that the exercise description (article) will potentially have thousands of comments attached.

Argument con responses as articles:

Discussion happens in the submission queue.

True of any article. If you mean, "Discussion happens only in the submission queue", this is true of any rejected article. If you mean, "Discussion is limited to the submission queue", this is a false statement.

Inflated number of articles

I consider that preferable to an inflated number of comments per article.

articles (responses) posted potentially all over the place

True for any article. What's to stop me from submitting an article on planet design and putting it in publishing/plot? Only the moderation queue. Same is true for exercise responses.

Anonymous visitors cannot participate in the exercises. Yes, I know that anonymous visitors can submit an article, but a precious lot of good that will do them if they can't read the discussion their response generates!

This is, in my mind, the only significant argument for exercise results as comments. Have already agreed with you and accepted that your strategy be followed on this point alone.

We agree that having responses as comments makes commenting on the description of the exercise difficult.

Finale

Basically, I think that having responses as comments to an exercise has far fewer and smaller disadvantages than having responses as articles.

Rather, responses as comments has one very strong argument in favor for the short term. I expect that in the long term it will become a horror that will be difficult to correct.

In the end, it all boils down to the fact that it is your site and you have the final say. This is as it should be. All I can do is offer my opinions, which I have done. I have no wish to discuss this further, in fact I only went this far because you wished it.

if you think of another possible way to handle exercises, I'd love to hear it.

Not without changing the code :)

In Closing

Please note that I will be very short on time the next few days and that tomorrow (Tue Jul 17) I expect to have no time at all for anything on the internet. Some time after Thu Jul 19 I may have no access to the internet at all for weeks or months. There are a number of things I wished to do here and other comments I wished to reply to that it looks like I just won't have time for. Hope I have been helpful.

eep. counted words:
[snip]
I guess this means I have to figure out how to work those words in and rewrite...

"eep"???

Mebbe not. Might be more effective to simply let it be for now and remember to consider hot keywords on the next rewrite. In the meantime you might come up with more that you want to include.

That looks good. I wonder how they add links to a section when it has no editor, though? I'll submit my site to it though, as soon as I think up a good one-sentence description of the site.

I don't think it needs to be one sentence. A short paragraph seems to be acceptable. More later.

It [.sig advertising] got you here, didn't it? :-)

Yeah, but one hit in six months is not being terribly effective.

Must remember to actually post more, so it gets seen more.

I would suggest that you simply continue to visit the sites that you have been and post when you really have something to say. Posting just to get your .sig seen is not likely to interest people enough so that they want to find out more about you.

A better slogan than "Yet another writers' forum" might help interest people,

Might. Again, as I mentioned elsewhere, you seem to have constructed this site to be more of a "writers' workshop" than a "writers' forum".

I do try to mention it at least once per chat, but everybody there just says 'I'll try to remember to check it out' - or ignores it.

I was thinking more in the line of a "This IRC host is sponsored by ..." message that each person saw as they logged in. This kind of thing is more to build/keep public awareness than to get any immediate results.

The chats are supposed to be jointly hosted between WO and TC, but I have no members at the moment who go to the chats except me.

So maybe TC could have a little larger "hosted by ..." message and also add a line (with link of course) that you are maintaining a transcript of all old sessions. BTW, don't look to me to join the chats :)

No, none of the other sites I link to have back links. A few of them aren't writing sites at all (like most of the language links). I will email them and ask if they'd be willing to link back to me, though.

Just a thought. Shouldn't take up much of your time, shouldn't offend anyone (some might be flattered), might get some results. Who knows, some of the people you write to might decide to get involved here themselves.

On a related note, Jessica Page Morell's The Writing Life is at the top of the Ideas in Ink list of sites. As an example, you might add this to your resources. This site actually could fit under several categories: plot, characterization, getting started, point of view, critiquing, and more. So you add her in one or more places, send her a friendly note saying you have done so, and suggesting that she link back to you, perhaps linking to the Exercise section as a place to submit exercises, using her suggestions, for critique. If she, in turn, decided to contribute here directly, that would be a real prize.

Most of the not directly related to writing sites would probably not have anyplace appropriate to link back to you. Who's to say that your email might not flatter them enough that they made a place to show how their work was being used outside their field. Even if you never got any hits directly from those sites, just having the links in place would boost your standing on sites like Google.

On DMoz

We're probably a bit more towards the Creative Writing category, since this isn't just a 'chat with other writers' site, but there's definitely some of both.

We seem to be of a same mind here. Note also that "chat" tends to imply random, pretty much real time chatter w/ no threads and no record which can be read later and commented upon, the comment becoming part of the discussion. That swung my choice even more to the "Creative Writing" category.

Yahoo's directory has creative writing hidden very well: Arts: Humanities: Literature: Creative Writing. Not the place I would have looked for it.

Hadn't looked at Yahoo. On examination and digging deeper, it would appear that "Arts:Humanities:Literature:Genres:Science Fiction and Fantasy:Writing" is the best. This has (presently) three entries, one of which is specifically for teen Trekkies. Of the other two, one is on Geocities and uses Javascript, the other uses frames. This would also put you automatically in "Arts:Humanities:Literature:Creative Writing:Workshops:Science Fiction and Fantasy."

Hey, now we are three!

I agree w/ Janra on the email thing, and reducing # of sections. What Janra didn't mention is that, at the moment, pretty much everything goes to the front page.

Or maybe allow people to post their "masterpieces"; people love to express themselves.

Yes, they do. However Write On is not providing any critiquing services, nor is it a magazine.

IMHO, if both the statements in the last paragraph are taken as exactly and literally true, then WO has no purpose and no future. More correctly, one might say "Write On is not providing critiquing services for works intended for sale, nor is it a fiction magazine."

WO has an exercise section where people are expected to submit small pieces for critiquing to improve the skills of the submitter. Please note the emphasis. I would further like to see it possible for people to be able to, and actually do, submit exercises they make up themselves or get from elsewhere, for the same type of critiquing. [I don't like that "able to ..." construction, but cannot think of any better way to say what I intend.]

WO is not a static magazine for fact or fiction, true. It is, however, an interactive, dynamic magazine where people are intended to present copy for online publication.

If people post stories here they will be considered 'published' - potentially ruining their chance at getting them published for real.

You have hinted at this before, and I saw similiar hints on either critters or Toasted Cheese, or both. Is this a real issue? Have such cases occurred in the past? If not, why worry about it? If so, you should have a warning about it somewhere, with citations of actual events. Possibly more than one place.

BTW, I find your use of "published for real" to mean what I would call "commercially published" amusing :)

Further, anyon