The Last Roundup FAQ - The Last Roundup

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Obselescence #1 · Sep 14th, 2014 · · ·

A FAQ for The Last Roundup

What is this?

This is more or less an effort to produce a viable alternative to Fimfiction’s Famous Featured Box. Which, as has been stated by eighty gazillion people across the span of human history, is rather flawed.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell:

-Stories that will get featured: Popular Stories.
-Stories that may or may not get featured: Good Stories.

There’s nobody to blame for this. It’s an automated system, and like all soulless machines, it has no concept of taste. My thought here is: “We’re human. We have tongues. We can taste better than that. Better than some evil machine!”

Envision a world where people can look at a list of solid and good recent stories, instead of “Poor Halo Crossover,” “Tentacle Sex,” and “Tentacle Sex 2: Now With Halo.”

Does that world seem good to you? Then perhaps you’ll like The Last Roundup.

Who are y’all anyway?

An assorted collection of people with a certain amount of literary chops. The full list of folks running things behind the curtain here are as follows:

-Obselescence
-RainbowBob
-Professor Plum
-Present Perfect
-Pearple Prose
-alexmagnet
-Pav Feira
-The Plebeian
-RazgrizS57
-Sunchaser
-Csquared08

How does The Last Roundup work?

Simply put: We’ll Feature Stories. Every Sunday, there’ll be a new update, which you’ll be able to find on the main group page (or, if you prefer to get notifications, you can follow Obselescence and get updates through the feed via blogs). Our crackpot team of story people will sift through the stories posted in the prior week and dig up a handful of stuff that’s probably worth your time. There’s no guarantee that you’ll enjoy it, but at the least it’s a bit of signal in the noise.

Each week, you’ll get the following:

-3-5 Story Slots. Comedy, Dark, Sad, Slice-of-Life, etc. Stuff that’s probably worth your time from the last week. It may not necessarily be an objective masterpiece, but we thought it was good enough to put there and be read. So you should probably read it.

-1-2 Wildcard Slots. These can be whatever’s managed to catch our eye lately. Such as a sixth story that couldn’t fit into the first five, an absurdly popular recent story that wouldn’t necessarily get into the first five slots, or potentially even an older story which we dug up and can’t help but recommend a look-see on.

There’s no guarantee that the Wildcard slots will contain GOOD (or bad) stuff, but they’re at least likely to contain INTERESTING stuff.

We’ll try to fill as many slots as we can manage per week. The lower bounds are just a baseline minimum for us to fall back on if the worst occurs.

Can I suggest stories to be featured?

Of course you can! In fact, we totally hope you do, because there’s no real good way for us to sift through every story that gets posted in a week. There’ll be weekly threads for people to put potential features forward, and we’ll try to check those out to see what we’ll put in the box.

There’re two major guidelines regarding submissions, though, so please pay attention:

-Suggested stories MUST have been first published within two weeks of the upcoming post on Sunday. If we’re taking suggestions for a Sunday the 27th Feature Post, you’re free to suggest any story that was published as far back as the 13th. You may not suggest a story that was published on, say, Saturday the 12th for a Sunday the 27th post.

-Suggestions are not guaranteed to be featured. Please don’t expect that they will be, or ask us why a story you suggested didn’t get featured. We’ll put up what we put up—and I mean that in the nicest possible way. We’re not going to be able to please everyone. It’s just not possible for finite beings to accomplish. We simply ask that you don’t put us in the awkward position of attempting to do so anyway by demanding answers from us.

-Suggested stories may not be written by the suggesting user. It’s nice that you think your work’s good, and want to help get it out there—no, really, it is—but this isn’t really the place to promote yourself. There are other groups out there that you can use to promote your stories. In the meantime, focus on writing a story other people would want to suggest here, or suggest another author’s work that you really enjoyed.

If you caught that there were three guidelines here instead of two, good job! You were paying attention.

Can Clopfics get Featured?

The answer to this one is a solid ‘maybe.’ It depends on the story. If you’re asking about Mature-rated stories in general—yes. Those can get featured here. We’re not going to specifically forbid a story about Twilight having egregiously hot lesbian sex with Rainbow Dash. That said, if it’s not actually a good story and the only plot involved is Twilight’s bouncing on Dash’s, it’s not likely to be featured.

We understand there’s a market for this sort of stuff, but we’re trying to provide features based first on story quality, and not on “This inspires arousal in me.” There are specific groups for that stuff—plus the actual Featured Box. Good clopfics CAN get featured... with the caveat that a lot of clop is admittedly not well known for its quality.

It’s POSSIBLE that something sufficiently eye-catching or interesting will make it into a Wildcard Slot, even if it doesn’t meet our qualifications for a regular slot, but you should neither bank on that nor assume we’re endorsing it if it does.

What makes you different from Equestria Daily/Crystal Empire Monthly/Earth Yearly?

Well, first up: The Last Roundup is focused on recent stories from the past week. We’re not necessarily a repository for all quality works produced by the fandom. We’re a featured box. We deal in currency. Other groups will show you stuff if you’re just looking for a historical record of the upper crust in pony fanfiction. We’ll feature stuff. All will be as it should be.

Secondly—and I say this with the best of intentions—we’re not offering feedback to authors. Or even really an objective assurance that your story’s a work of art if it gets featured.

This isn’t because we hate you, or because we don’t care. It’s because offering more than that is an exponential boost to the effort required on our part (we’d rather not this become a horrible, angry chore). And because, frankly, the more that gets said about why a story did or didn’t get our thumbs-up, the more controversy it generates.

That said, this also means we don’t need to be sticklers for a sentence here or there with shaky grammar, or a minor bit that didn’t quite gel with us. It gives us the freedom to recommend stories based on whether they’re ultimately good or enjoyable, without needing to focus on minutiae.

We’re not trying to be an objective baseline for story quality. We’re trying to recommend you stories we thought were good from the past week or so. If you don’t agree with our selections or omissions therein, that’s fine, but either wait for us to make new recommendations that might appeal more to your tastes, or avoid us in the future.

Participation in The Last Roundup is voluntary on both sides. If you like what we’re doing, stick around and check out the bounty of stories we’ll offer. If you don’t, feel free to walk away. Thanks for reading this far in either way.

September

September #2 · Sep 15th, 2014 · · ·

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