4039432
god I hope so

4039432
4040511
What, don't want our world to entirely revolve around writeoffs?

4040614
I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR A YEAR NOW

4040511
All my possible agreement with this.

I don't know if I'm okay with you guys doing other things with your time.

4041991
It's true. The writeoff keeps you kids off the street.

4092515
7th March, as the op indicates.

Excellent!

A full week before I start the grueling stress of uni.

Count me in.

3698214
I kind of wish this information was available on writeoff.me. I keep forgetting to check this old thread to discover when the next event is.

Maybe even a calendar that goes out more than 1-2 weeks in advance could be useful...

haha and just like that, I'm so back on board this time :V

I'm getting a weird page when I go to the writeoff.me website:

Welcome to nginx!

If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required.

For online documentation and support please refer to nginx.org.
Commercial support is available at nginx.com.

Thank you for using nginx.

This is located at www.writeoff.me

I can still look at the main page, but it is just being weird for me.

4233338
Oh, yeah, forgot about that. Fixed.

4234594
Yea. Just forgot about it in my nginx config. I moved the server from MLPchan's to my own on Tuesday.

4234739
oh wow :O farewell, MLPchan, we hardly knew ye ;_;7

4234770
I have a full-time job now owing partly to my employer being impressed by my work here, so it's not a big deal.

4236866
That's seriously awesome. :O

4238026
It only costs $10 USD / month. It's no big deal, really.

You can help by translating the site copy into French when I have that set up.

4319842
Sure.

Though the OP is only 27 weeks old, so there isn't presently any ambiguity.

3698214 If these are instructions, then would it be alright for them to be...more specific? I mean, I don't necessarily understand what this means...

4327067 So...We send it in on May 15th or start writing it, then?

4327025 You might find this page useful!

P.S. Roger, have you changed the layout of the FAQ page? I don't remember it being quite so sleek and fancy with the whole "expanding boxes" thing before. Either way, I like it. It looks nice.

4327082 Thanks for your help, I'll look t it when I can!

4327200 I'm still a bit lost... Just... when should I write it is the question I guess I'm asking.

4328893 Oh, alright.. I think I get it, now. So after that day how long o we have until we stop submitted? Or even on the day if that's what it is?

4329051 Alright then!! I understand now -- thanks so much for bearing with me!

4329263 I hope so too!
And BTW: Is it random writing or is there a theme of sorts?

4336382
We always get a prompt. Don't worry, it'll probably make more sense when the event gets underway. :)

4336451 Al...right...

Could we postpone the write off 1 week? That weekend is fathers day weekend, and I don't know about others, but I will be visiting my father out of town and won't even be near a computer all weekend.

4463092
Father's day isn't until September.

4463349

Wow, I don't know why but I didn't even think about what day other countries celebrate fathers day on. First time I felt like one of those parody 'Merica memes.

4463349
Would it be okay to take a poll to find out how many authors will be celebrating father's day this weekend? If it's a large majority I think it would be okay to postpone it a week, if everyone and yourself was fine with that.

4468932
It would be inappropriate to reschedule on such short notice.

4469254
I don't really think so, but it's fine ^.^

Given that the last writeoff only had one week of judging instead of two, do we really need to wait until July 25th for the next one (which would be a full month gap between writeoffs) instead of having it be on July 18th (which would have the same lengths of weeks between the end of the judging period and the start of the next write-off)?

Someone mentioned it seeming like it was a long ways off in the discussion thread.

4518606
Eh, I don't like changing dates, and it gives me more time to implement all the changes lined up.

The jury's still out on how much time we want for voting and how that time is divided.

4519885

The jury's still out on how much time we want for voting and how that time is divided.

What's the process for proposing changes on these things, again? My feeling right now is that one week is considerably too short and two weeks is probably too long, and that from a reviewing standpoint (though admittedly reviews are not officially part of the process), prelim time is more important than finals time, given that I think the takeaway from the thread I started a week or so back is that interest does drop off after the final slate gets revealed. Horizon and I talked about the issue some and both liked the idea of a 10-day period with a 6/4 prelim/finals split, to make sure both prelims and finals periods had a mix of weekend days and weekdays, to allow for schedule variability among participants. I'd be happy to toss that out as a formal proposal, but I don't remember the mechanism involved.

4520240
There's no process. In practise, things get done by you convincing me that it's a good idea.

I'm not too sure what the right time frame is. A Matter of Perspective had pretty much the same votes per story but fewer reviews per story than Great Expectations (according to the spreadsheets), but the A Matter of Perspective discussion thread had more posts in half the time.

4518606
I'm all for keeping things the way they are, since the 17th is the weekend of Trotcon. >.>

4520317
Well, I don't know about other people, but anecdotally I can report feeling pretty rushed by the timeframe, like I needed to drop other projects and focus on the writeoff to be able to get anything done in the timeframe. I would have really liked to read and review more than two slates of stories, but for me I don't think that was going to happen with a three-day window. I'm sure other people's mileage may vary, though.

4520317
I don't think number of posts is a good comparison. Over time the idea of "one review per post" has become a great deal more prevalent, which significantly skews the thread size.

Agreed with 4520468 that three days was way too short. Bradel: I'd say go ahead and start a new thread in the forum with the suggestion of 6/4, and that'll give people better chances to weigh in with positives/negatives/alternate suggestions without cluttering this thread up.

3698216 Why is this crossed out? Are you not scheduling any polished-story contests?

4542058
No. We already tried it and it just dragged things out.

4542304 Was that Title Drop? I was in that one. I wrote a story I was really happy with, and we had 3 great winners, "Collaborators", "All the Mortal Remains", and "Intern". I think we got had good, complete stories in that set of 21 than in this latest of 59. I'd call that a great success. I don't know what you mean when you say the longer writing period dragged things out.

4542518

I remember feeling like it took a long time, but in retrospect, we did have a lot of great stories come out of that round. Possibly one of our best total packages, even considering it had fewer entries.

Maybe we should re-look.

4542518
4542538
I remember not using the extra time for my own story; I'm not sure how many people actually did end up using the extra time, instead of procrastinating all week on it or doing other things.

Probably something we should have kept better track of at the time.

Looking at it, though, while that round did have a number of good stories, I think comparing it to this round might be a bit unfair; while Title Drop was a good round, Great Expectations, Closing Time, Behind Closed Doors, and There is Magic in Everything all had a fair number of good stories as well.

And to be fair to this round, An Old Coot is probably going to get 5,000+ views, Serving Her Community got several thousand, and Dying to Get There got like, 11,000. Star Bright, A Butterfly, Dreaming, The Phantom of the Genre, Time Enough for Friendship, Of Flies and Spiders, Dream a Little Dream of Me, and Cycle of Tides haven't gone up on the site yet, all of which I think have at least a reasonable chance of success. Neither CiG nor GaPJaxie participated in this last round, either.

All that being said, I don't object to trying it out again, but I'm not so sure that we're going to get any different result from last time, which was more or less "I'm not sure that this made any difference". If we were to try it again, we probably need to actually gather more relevant data, such as whether or not people actually used the extra time.

4543625
I definitely used the extra time in Title Drop, but A Basilisk For One was a special case -- I had to spend a day or two figuring out how to hack the site for the story's gimmick.

It wasn't my original idea, either. If I'd only had the standard three days, I would have played the competition straight.

4544485 Just to say that you finally got my curiosity up enough for me to go back and read A Basilisk For One and I wanted you to know I am very, very impressed

To stay vaguely on topic: As someone who wasn't around last time, I would find it really interesting to see how people do in a polished-story contest. Of course, it's up to Roger, but I think it would be interesting to see if there was much of a difference, if nothing else. (But I think I would end up procrastinating all week, too!)

4542518
4542538
4543625

I definitely used:

The extra time. The one thing I've proven to myself in the nine or ten of these I've participated in is that I'm not very good at writing stories under our usual time constraints. Of course, I might be biased since "Collaborators," the story I wrote during the "polished story" round, is both the only story that's gotten me a medal in the contest and the only story of mine that's ever made it into the Featured Box...

Still, the version of "Collaborators" on the Writeoff site is a very different story from the final version on FimFiction, which might just prove that even given a week to write, I still need more time. So one day, three days, a week: I'm still likely to turn out a partially-finished story instead of a complete one. Fortunately, I enjoy doing things I'm not very good at--I mean, I've been drawing 11 pages of webcomics a week for more than a decade, and the art is still what one reviewer called "sandpaper for the eyes"--so I'm likely to keep entering for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and "Phantom of the Genre" has been posted, TD. It's the sixth chapter of Sharp Spark's short story collection, The Minuette-ventures of Princess Twilight Sparkle.

Mike