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So, was gonna put this in as an idea in Kiels thread, but decided to put it here instead.


Here's my reason.

We've had several many people start writing exercises, or at least different times. Many people enjoy them, but people aren't infallible, and the people who never venture into the forums never see it. But every time, we get comments on how great it was, and how they'd like it to continue.


Here's my idea.

It would be another little tab thing, like right between "My Stuff" and "Help & Info" (or anywhere else).
On it, would be two sub-tabs. one would be 'Weekly Prompt' the other would be 'Submit'. (best I can come up with right now)
Submit: You can submit up to 3 ideas per week for writing prompts - it would have to be approved of by an admin to make sure it was appropriate and meets whatever standards we put on it. The submissions will enter a collective pool from the entire site, and will stay there.
Weekly Prompt: One will randomly be chosen from the collective pool and will be displayed. Ever seen one of those sites where it counts the number of words, and it grades what level your writing it at? What you write for the prompt will have the number of words counted to make sure it met a specific number, and then have it graded to have a minimum of say, 3rd grade level to be submitted. If you submit something to the writing prompt that meets all criteria, then you'll get a set number of points, like 5.


Here're my goals.

1. Members have something more engaging to do in case they don't like forums, have already read the good stories, and have writers block. (Example: Me, except I participate in the forums - without that, I would have dissipated into oblivion long ago.)
2. Allows the community to enjoy writing exercises without depending on a single person who will inevitably be unable to continue for a length of time.
3. I know there's a third reason. There's always a third reason, for every good suggestion. Just can't think of it right now.


I know that this will be a hard and complex thing to put in, as far as I can tell, but I think it would really help encourage the good writers to actually stay long enough to make a story of their own.

Well... it's a very interesting concept, making it a genuine site feature. We could even feed into it the exercises from the previous weeks. I think I have 15 or so weeks worth, I know Morgan had quite a few. But I wonder if Alexp would be willing to set this up. It sounds more complex than your run-of-the-mill request.

It's a decent idea, but it's something that can be organized easily enough among members. Not to mention it would be an entirely new feature he'd have to make from scratch.

Tldr version: No third reason, auto-rejected

This would be a very nice feature to have, but I'm not sure how easy it'll be to implement. 

That's not a bad idea.  I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but it would be worth asking alexp if there were some way to incorporate it.