[gracilis]

Anything we may do to assist you here, Lingster? Delivery of coffee beans, some extra eyes to look over a server config, moderators to handle a spam queue?

[gracilis]

Thank you for posting,
I think the name of the guy who wrote Walden is spelled "Thoreau."

[gracilis]

Great story, gblock.  Would you like to post it to Brawna so it doesn't get buried in the forums?

I was a little annoyed at Mayim for seemly forgetting that she'd wished "to become the ultimate object of sexual attraction," and/or that she didn't trust that all components of her wish would be fulfilled rather than one cancelling out the others, but…  that's a minor complaint.  The whole "two angels are sitting in a bar" thing was a fun approach, and the detail and pacing of the growth scenes was well done.  Keep up the good work!

[gracilis]

Domination of this sort isn't exactly my favorite thing, as you may have guessed, but it's awful hard to read stories in this genre without reading a lot of femdom, so I'm not saying you shouldn't post it here.

I think one of the things that made this story (or at least this first segment of it) hard to recognize as a domination story is that she doesn't really seem to take much pleasure in domination.  Yeah, there's some sibling rivalry, she enjoys the fact that she can get her way and she certainly likes to gloat to her brother, but overall, exerting control over the lives of others doesn't really come through as a motivation for her.  Maybe it's there, but it's dwarfed by her desire for food — we only see her bugging her brother when she thinks she can get food out of him.  And what she's doing is a pretty stupid way to get food.  So her character comes across not only as immature (which you intended), but also as stupid and unresourceful, and I'm not sure if that's what you wanted.  Whether or not there's a correlation between intelligence and middle-school performance is a subject for another thread, but the comment about her schoolwork makes it sound like she *might* actually have a brain.

In any case, I'll be curious to see how things go for Phil in the future.

[gracilis]

This actually makes me pretty sad.  I read more here about a boy's despair than FMG.  I mean, I'm sure young teenage girls can be pretty self-absorbed, but does she have no compassion for her brother?  With all her power, can't she find some more effective food supply than stealing her brother's dinner, or taking the money from his minimum-wage job?  A sad story indeed.

[gracilis]

Lingster, you're a bastard.

Okay, now that we've agreed on that much…

I understand the desire to build community.  And I suppose that if you have 500 users who post and 6000 who don't, you're paying for over ten times as much bandwidth as you think you need just to support your community.  Given that your hosting costs aren't trivial anymore, that does kinda suck.

However, threatening to exile lurkers does not strike me as a great way to build online community.  There's a long-standing tradition of lurking in online forums, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, lurking for your first few weeks in the community is often considered good etiquitte.  It gives you a chance to get a feel for the norms of the place so you don't just jump straight in and make a fool of yourself.

Secondly, how do your content providers feel about this?  Yes, I know they all want feedback.  They put much of their life and soul in to their work, and while some might say that the work is it's own reward, they would be wrong.  We have social needs, and recognition and praise are tremendously important.  One of the big reasons that people publish is because they want to form a connection with others.  Feedback from critics and peers is also critical to developing your skills.  But none of that necessarily means that you want to cut people off from your work for not providing feedback.  It reduces the size of your audience, means that people who might enjoy your work will now not have that opportunity.  Is that what you wanted?

Thirdly, you cannot sustain a community of six thousand contributing members.  I'm not just saying that because I still think that web forums are a lousy platform; communities simply do not scale to that size while retaining their quality, whether they're web forums, chat rooms, usenet groups, or town halls.  Different sources will give you different numbers, but they're generally closer to 150 than 6,000.  At some point, the volume of traffic becomes too much for many members to stay in touch with, intimacy drops, the signal to noise ratio rises.  The community loses its heart.  Surely you've been around long enough to see this happen time and time again.

So there are some reasons why that is a crappy plan.  How can we address your problem in a less crappy way?  I'm not really sure, but I have some leads.  Gather recognizes the value of contributions with
Gather Points."  Now you probably don't have the same option of redeeming contribution points for Barnes & Noble gift certificates as they do (unless you move Amaz0ns to Gather?), but it's a nice idea, and rewards are probably a better way to groom a community than
threats to remove content.

Another resource on this topic is the Online Community Toolkit.  Currently in their Whats New section is "a nice synthesis of the issues around people who read in online groups but don't post."  That's timely of them.

or you could just post more entries about controversial BOFH moderation policies.  After all, it got me to post, right?  😉

[gracilis]

See Templeton's Ten Big Myths About Copyright Explained.

In short: it's copyrighted.  There may not be a notice until the last page of the publication in four-point font, but it's copyrighted.  Even if there isn't a notice, it's still protected, thanks to the Berne Convention.  So basing your decision off whether or not it has "clearly marked copyright and owner tags" is probably a poor idea.  Unless that "clearly marked copyright" is, say, a Creative Commons mark which explicitly grants you the right to redistribution.
IMHO, posting things without owner tags is kind of a double blow: not only does the copyright holder not get payment, but the artist doesn't even get any recognition for their work. 

AlexG's guidelines have some merit to them, though.  If you're not actually damaging the copyright holder's revenue stream, you're probably not worth prosecuting.  That's not to say it's "fair use"; republishing copies of someone else's work is not "fair use", nor is making derivative works.  It's simply violating copyright law in a way you hope no-one cares about.

(When automatic DRM systems come into effect, they're likely to enforce indiscriminately whether anyone "cares" or not.  Hooray for progress!)

I'm not saying you shouldn't post pictures, because heck, I like looking at pictures of Denise Rutkowski.  But if the forum is going to have rules based on what might "violate laws," we should have our facts straight.

[gracilis]

That’s right. Okay, so since I get enough vitamins and minerals and drink a lot of water, then there shouldn’t be a problem. All I was worried about was if there was some super cool bodybuilding secret where I was supposed to ingest extra electrolytes to supercharge my workouts or something 🙂

I recently read The Performance Zone (Ivy and Portman, ISBN 1591201489), and it basically reads like an advertisement for sports drinks but it claims to be well supported by a number of studies.  The basic idea is that if you supply your body with water and the right nutrients during your workout (and immediately before and after), you'll have more stamina, damage your cells less, and recover faster.  Performance Zone is targeted at athletes where endurance is more of a concern than strength, but the authors have another book called Nutrient Timing which I suspect is mostly the same material but packaged for strength athletes.

The other thing they push in this book is including protien in your sports drink.  They have a number of charts graphing different things, but they all say "hydrating with water: good.  hydrating with electrolyte + carb drink: better.  hydrating with electrolyte + carb + protien: more better."

[gracilis]

I just want to ask you all, as men, if hearing what a female character is thinking is interesting or if it’s all “yap yap yap.”

As you found out in the "Why muscles?" thread, a lot of us are looking for other attributes besides physical characteristics.  When I read FMG, I'm very interested in the character's reaction to her growing power.  How does this affect her self image?  How does it change how she relates to other people?  So yes, I'm interested in what the character is thinking.

There are a number of ways to communicate that — "show, don't tell" is an often repeated bit of advice, but it's not genre-specific so I probably don't need to go in to it.

I'm just about to finish this post when I noticed your wording, "what a female character is thinking."  Um, no, I don't think female characters are more likely to be read as "yap yap yap" than the male characters or asexual androids are.

[gracilis]

I guess you should take my complaints with a grain of salt, because I'm biased to start with: I really dislike web forums.  Every web forum interface I've ever dealt with feels much more cumbersome to me than any fidonet/usenet/email reader I use.  So my real objective is to get people to post to the story archive where I can actually find stuff when I want to.

While I don't mind the finer-grained division in forum topics in theory (easier to find stuff I want, right?), in practice it bothers me because unless there's no more than one I want to read, it means looking through more forums.  But, like I said, I'm never going to be really happy with the forums (unless you gateway them to NNTP or something), so, go for it.  Just as long as people remember to use the story archive.  😉

(and I will follow links to discussion threads from the story archive; I do think that's a good idea.)

[Author]

Posts