Which settings do you use for your stories?

[tan82]

As I've created my first story, I've been considering how best to set it up and how other people do it. I'm thinking of which permissions you prefer to give writers. Are they allowed to link threads, and when do you make them trusted members?

So far I have allowed members to link stories, but I'm been thinking if that's really such a good idea. I'm not sure how much I'd like others to begin linking around in the story.

I've also set it to first promote members when I've approved five of their threads. I think that's a bit high since I usually see threads where it's one or three.

Actually I'm considering whether I want the story to be open at all. I think that the problem may be for me that I think of it too much as MY story, and not more of a shared story where I'm just the editor, which is how I generally view chyoo. I guess I'll either have to wait and see what people begin adding and then decide whether it should stay open, or I will close it untill I feel that I've worked on it some more and that it's ready for others to begin adding to it.

Anyone else giving some thought to these things, or do you just have some standard settings that you use for all your stories?

 

[Zingiber]

Some of the settings matter more than others in general.

Open/Closed and Maximum Threads make a big difference.

Sometimes I'll start a story Closed, and then quickly open it up; other times I'll start Open. If a story is Closed, nobody else can contribute. Not sure how that would interact with "trusted" or "sub-editor". Anyone tried that out?

From the ratings on a story of mine that started Closed, it seemed to irk some people. Hard to know. When I'm a contributing author, I generally like to see the original author/editor develop the characters and some possible plot lines a few threads out before I add a contribution, but if it's an attractive story set-up, I might jump in earlier.

Some people make a story Closed if they want to re-create it from scratch, or do a lot of editing before re-opening it for collaboration.

Maximum Threads = 1 means the story doesn't branch, it's a simple sequence of threads. AaronWebster, master of the set-piece form, has a story of this type, The Pampered Pussy Club, following a women's sex club through its successive meetings.

Maximum Threads = 2 means that each thread in the story can have at most two alternative. Daciasdesire created her monumental story The Choices We Make in this form. Sometimes it feels a little constraining, but the limitation can also help a story develop rather than sprawling all over the place.

Maximum Threads = 3 or 4 give more latitude for choice. I set Maximum Threads = 4.

It's possible to fudge the Maximum Threads value by jumping directly to the edit page. I've seen this done in a number of stories where the first choice is "what kind of character do you want to follow through this world?"


Some settings matter more if you're a slow editor than if you're a more diligent one, such as the automatic approval and promotion-to-trusted settings.

I prefer not to auto-promote members to "trusted", but allow for auto-approval by trusted members or ratings. I don't recall that anyone has actually gotten a thread approved by those means for one of my stories, since I've typically been an active editor. I like to correspond a little via email with a potential trusted member.

Even trusted members' threads are subject to editing, for spelling, style, or consistency. Usually there's not much to be fixed up. Occasionally I'll break a submitted thread that seems too long to me, or offers another obvious decision point somewhere in the middle, or I'll merge in some of my own text if that makes the thread-to-thread transition point smoother.

I have a stylistic quirk where I'll repeat a little bit from the last thread in order to set up the scene for a new thread, but reworded differently, or sometimes just different.

I allow writers to edit their threads. It seems more bother to everyone if I had to re-approve a thread in order to fix a typo or other small change, which seems to me is generally the nature of a change made after approval. The risk seems mostly that a writer who is retiring from Chyoo sometimes empties out their threads.

I allow writers to link threads. I haven't had any trouble with this. The only one who's messed up any thread linkage on my stories has been my own self. If I noticed trouble, I expect I'd close it down.

Some people seem to have lots of threads submitted that are very short. I haven't had trouble with this.

Some settings just don't seem useful.

The Minimum Karma, Rating, Votes, and Threads haven't seemed useful to me. "Minimum Threads" actually does something kind of weird, if I recall correctly -- it more or less requires that the editor has to be the first to add a follow-up to any existing thread until the "Minimum Threads" number is reached.

-Z