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Suggestions for improvements and additions to the site.
This feature was accepted 1/25/2017: Good idea
This feature was completed 5/8/2021: Creating a space is probably bad encouragement

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

There's a website called Nationstates that some teachers use as a teaching tool, for creative writing or social studies or whatever. Interesting thing is, Nationstates kind of isn't appropriate for school, but they have a school setting and account system that restricts certain issues and keeps them out of the forums. We could have a similar setting for accounts. Teachers can create their accounts as teachers, and students can sign up under them. Students can't use the forums, or view stories above a certain age level. Their stories don't take up space as titles, (A school story titled something won't take that title's space, so you won't have people unable to name their publishable stories certain things just because a School person wrote it.) and can only be published to the teacher and the class. This way, we aren't faced with the trouble of having loads of sub-par school stories, and teachers don't have to deal with our volatile community dipping in and spoiling their precious innocence.

Or, if you want a solution that'll actually happen, let's have a highly publicized article that explains how to use CYS in education: Ignore the forums, enable sneak peek, and keep the stories unpublished. Read them all through shared links, because, seriously, that's an easy enough step since your kids are all on computers to begin with.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

I prefer to continue the assblasting of schoolchildren. 

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

I dunno, I think it's valuable to throw children to the wolves once in awhile as a teaching tool. (Good job, by the way.)

I just don't feel like expecting teachers to spend 15 minutes familiarizing themselves with a site before turning their illiterate charges lose on it is asking so much, really.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

I just came upon a most unusual rash of empathy recently, however faint. Apparently, you can do this kind of thing for Creative Writing classes in some places, and I looked back on my middle-school, Randomly-Walk-Era self and thought, "Huh, I sure would've loved it if I could've come here for a grade!". And it would've been marvelous to have written CYOAs for school. Of course, the immediate problem is that there aren't many easy mediums for building CYOAs other than Twine, (Which has to be downloaded, which doesn't work on self-resetting school computers without several PTA meetings and IT guys tuning everything up, and it requires basic coding, which some Sentinel-Like kids just won't get.)  Infinite Story, (Which is nearly twice as toxic and half as likely to do anything about it.) Chyoo2, (Which isn't going to be school-friendly any time soon.) and CoG (Which is fairly self explanatory.)

If we want non-linear narratives to become as treasured and traditional a part of the above-average child's early literary career as the Valentines poem, the Personal Tall Tale, and the Regular Short Story, we need to take the first step.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

I'm sorry but your heart can't be allowed to grow three sizes today, you're at least a month too early.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

I actually like this idea. I usually think it's a shame that school stories are sort of immediately shot down because of the general poor quality so far, as this site could be a great tool to help kids develop their interest in writing stories. Despite, you know, the whole spoiling the innocence of poor school children and such that it's also kinda known for. This feature could most certainly help people use CYS for educational means, without incurring the wrath of the rest of the community. 

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago
As nice as that may be for us to do the question is why would we? We have no reason to cater to them.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

Every few onces in a while, we get a nice wave of bullshit school stories, which suck. This offers us a way to sort of control the quality, keeping shitty stories contained and in their own environment, to avoid the assblasting of children and unsuspecting school staff. It'd be easier than a blanket ban, like with WC, simply because it takes some degree of investigation to figure out whether it's actually a school story. It's another way to exile a whole "Genre" of garbage.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago

An article would be nice but 1.) It's in question whether it's even possible to publish articles anymore. The site is pretty broken in that area. And 2.) If a teacher didn't take the cursory glance around to notice what a bunch of foul mouthed dicks we all are, they'll never notice an article anyway.

I suppose a thread explaining the whole situation could be made and linked to as needed. A 'school project' tag should be doable too, so if we do come across one of these in the wild we can just point them to it rather than wasting time telling them how awful they are and to never write again.

 In fact the main reason I'd be in support of this is because it might prevent some of the really dire stories from being posted in the first place. 

'You should unpublish this immediately and just give your teacher the sneak peek link' is the absolute nicest I'm willing to be, and that seems to be the main idea here. Just, not sure how effective it would turn out to be.

[SITE] School Mode

7 years ago
I'm not sure something like this is worth the effort. I'd suggest if we want to do something like this, it would be with the goal of selling the "school section" of the site for development and cash money. As few times as this happens, I don't think it's worth the trouble (not to mention what if the teachers don't see or use that feature, anyway?).