GAME: My 2021 reviewing challenge to all of you

[System Error]

I was talking with a former prolific member around here a few days ago, and they mentioned some of their reasons for drifting away. They felt that the community here was gone, which they relied on to help finish writing. A bit of discussion into the details, we agreed it feels so impersonal around here these days, and a lot of it is because there's not as many reviews. Like just that simple acknowledgement that your writing is being read and appreciated by somebody helps motivation a lot.

I've been trying to read and review as much as I can - that's in-part to help mitigate this. But I'm just one person. Let's face it: reviewing is dead here, unless it involves events. I know some people are uneasy about giving them at times, yet they have no problems doing it then. Why should we have to limit it to just those occasional instances every few months?

So here's my challenge to all of you. One chapter of one fic a week. One chapter every two weeks if that's too much. Leave small comments instead of detailed full-on reviews if you have to. Just read others' fics. Take some time out of your days to do so. Help others grow with their writing, or just plain enjoy reading and let the authors know you're enjoying it.

Let's try to get this community going again.

 

[Rainfall]

Hey System Error!

Thank you again for posting this.

Spoiler: chatter

I've been here a while, though I'm still practically greenthumb, having joined last year as opposed to having been here for years, and I have no writing and very little reading and reviewing to show so far.

And to be completely honest, writing, pokemon, and pokemon fic aren't at the top of my priorities. Yet simultaneously, I've spent a very significant amount of time and mind this past year on these spaces and communities. I'm just a tiny foot soldier, but I do have some investment.

I apologize up front for going even lower than your challenge outlines, but hopefully, coming from me that will be a net positive (from a starting position of very little) rather than otherwise.

I do not commit to this, even, but I would like to read at least one chapter of a fic every month (not week), and hopefully leave at least some small comments.

Also. Cheers to everyone's efforts, previous work and accomplishments, and for still living plans and goals!

 

[Ihsan997]

This seems like a great idea!

I have a noob question: should reviews be posted in the same thread as the fanfic itself, or is there a separate space for leaving reviews?

 

[Rainfall]

Hey Ihsan!
Wasn't sure if your question already got answered elsewhere, but, yes!
Reviews on forums tend to go right in the story thread itself.
(I'm not well-versed enough to be aware of any alternatives in practice for forums, and I don't know any authors who would prefer them elsewhere.)

Spoiler: Notes

You can also highlight someone's text and hit +Quote to copy, and then use the "Insert quotes..." button in the reply to quote it. You can temporarily load multiple quotes in the forum "clipboard" to quote.

This seems like a great idea!

Spoiler boxes (such as for toggle space-saving) follow the same syntax format.
[SPOILER = "Spoiler title"]
Content here. Note that you have to remove the spaces around the equals sign, and after the forward-slash.
[/ SPOILER]

One thing I like to do is to open the story in one window for reading and quoting, and open another window for writing the response.

Of course, there's no need to quote. It's just useful to, and quoting is a feature for stories on forums. I personally like to over-rely on quoting and responding section-by-section.

If it's a long response or you're not going to post soon, I suggest saving it in a word processor file somewhere. Xenforo forums keeps drafts, but I'm not sure for how long, and occasionally drafts get eaten up and erased.

Spoiler: Screenshot of this post in edit mode

 

[Beth Pavell]

Indeed - a very few authors prefer reviews not to be posted in the story thread, but this is very much not the norm. As a question of practicality there's no real reason not to do so anyway - a forum makes it very easy to link chapters via a table of contents or threadmarks, so in practice reviews don't clutter the thread

 

[Welkamo]

I know this is an old thread, but I read it about a week ago and since then, I've been trying to do my part by reading and reviewing more. I've gotten not so great at focusing on reading over quarantine, but I think reading fics here may help. In addition, I get to engage more with a writing community.

 

[OrionTheAbsol]

It's weird that I'm just seeing this thread now. But I did notice that there was a drastically low amount of activity here, especially when it comes to reviews. I remember the writing community being more active in 2020, even though I wasn't writing at the time. While I do have some people outside of the community reading my story, it would be nice to get a wider audience to see if my ideas stuck with them.

I'll see how much of what I can do. A natural disaster slammed me hard back in February and I'm still putting the pieces back together. On top of that, I work full-time and try to get as much time as possible just to work on my own story.