https://forms.gle/jVys7YVzU14DFrMGA

the last two events were pretty fun! i've never been more involved in the site, the flow and presentation of rules were easy to follow, smooth outing all around, props to the organizers & marshals.

i've noticed the crit forums have been in a recession, partly due to the two consecutive events that happened and people being mentally exhausted and drained and stuff, but seconding what Uncanny said, i think a title like "critter of the month" would help greatly, similar to the critchamp thing. i know it's not a one-and-done solution to stagnation—just something that would be nice and satisfying to have! also, i don't mind reading/writing for old canons, a mini event around that would be nice.

my experience as a newcomer has been nothing but delight. although, i can understand the frustration when it comes to sparse communication from active staff about plans for the future. i don't doubt that the people who manage and facilitate the site really do care about it, and i've met so many cool people who share the same sentiment and want to make wonderful things for everyone too. i've always wanted to belong somewhere, to be part of a larger project that isn't about me, and this place makes me feel like i've been here all along, and i was just wandering by myself.

i've always thought that my writing is too simple. at the same time, it's also too purple. excessive emphasis on the flowery vibes, unbelievably pretentious, and trying to impress instead of honing in on the emotional core. but nothing could replace the joy of making things for the site. i actually could see myself improving, just by putting stuff out there. for once, i didn't care too much if it looked amateurish. my goal was to have fun. i want to thank WL for giving me the opportunity to express myself to this extent. i haven't been able to do that anywhere else. it means the world. that's all! thank you so much.

as for yummy meals, i ate fried egg and pata stew today.
- red

on the discord

it's good! i think my prior remarks on how to make the chat better were mostly a misdiagnosis, and chat has improved an enormous amount with just a better policing of immaturity and a greater culture of users being able to reach out to staff with issues. i think it's in a good place right now, and i've been greatly heartened to see a lot of the people expressing disillusionment and sadness in the first thread returning to the server and existing in harmony again.

discourses on the rating module

the rating module does a few things that i find agreeable:

1. it allows me to make it known that i have read and liked a piece in situations where i lack the time/energy/inclination/coherency of thought to leave a constructive comment.
2. it allows other people to do the same with my work.
3. it takes the temperature of how many people are reading the site and dialed in at least enough to make use of the lowest-effort form of engagement possible.
4. through the "top rated by month" page, it allows for mapping out how site readership and taste have changed over time, which i personally find interesting even if the practical utility is low.

i would miss all of these things if the rating module were flatly abolished, and i suspect that the produced effect would be, at best, an increase in low-effort comments that communicate exactly the same sentiment as a vote but take up more space. all that said, i acknowledge some problems with our current system that people justifiably want to see remedied:

1. having downvotes and using them for deletion purposes makes it so that posting here means subjecting the fate of your piece to the whims of people who may completely disregard what you're trying to do, impose bizarre interpretations that misunderstand surface-level elements of the text on you, or just not give you a reason for downvoting at all. scp gets away with this because the implicit contract you sign when you post there includes a pre-built audience; our pre-built audience consists of approximately six people, so we will always see more discontent with the system here, even if it almost never actually results in pieces that aren't spam/bigotry being deleted.
2. the existence of tools that keep meticulous track of every page and author's vote totals/rankings leads to people getting invested in the number as a measure of success and caring about it too much. at best, this is mildly annoying for people who don't care as much. at worst, this causes people to get their self-worth tied up in dubious metrics and crash out when the metrics aren't where they want them to be.

i believe that it is possible to tweak the current system without abolishing it altogether in a way that at least gets close to solving these problems while retaining the things i like about our current system:

1. switch the rating module to upvote-only (i know this is possible to do because the scp commune did it before) and have staff unilaterally decide if something warrants deletion according solely to the rules we already have for prohibited content. this solves the first problem right off the bat.
2. make it official content policy that the rating module has to be at the bottom of the page, rather than the top. this de-emphasizes the module and makes people at least a little less likely to look at it as a measuring stick of great importance
3. remove the list of top-rated pages of the month from the front page; make people navigate to the top-rated by month page on the sidebar if they want access to that information. this will, i hope, have the same effect as measure #2.
4. see if we can get smlt to scrub all the vote stuff (page ratings, author vote totals, author vote rankings) from crom results for the library website. i have no idea if this is feasible or if he would do it, but i reckon it's worth a shot, and removing the popularity ladder would do a lot for issue #2, i think.

if we can get all of this stuff done, and there are people who maintain their unhealthy relationship to the number, i feel that such a distorted perception cannot reasonably be taken on as the library's problem. we're a very small website that lacks the insidious metric-driven infrastructure of modern social media; i think we can handle having a basic like button if the gamification stuff is taken away.

some miscellaneous ideas i have in my head

• duos contest. i've seen some anti-contest sentiment in the discord server, and i understand where that comes from, but i also think contests are a fun and cool thing that can easily be made to work positively for the community (if they aren't doing so already, which i think they are), and i think one of the ways they can better work for us is through more team-based ones that de-emphasize individual performance in favor of collaboration. i don't know if we have enough users at the moment for a larger team contest, but i've long yearned for pairs.
• reviewer's spotlight feature. this is something i've been talking about for at least a year, and i think it's a super easy way to both incentivize participation in our critique process and make the front-page features more user-driven, which i understand is something we are interested in doing anyway.
• bring back the "critter's choice" award/discord role for people who go above and beyond the call of duty in terms of commenting and critique during the larger events like major contests and the sss. if memory serves, the last time this was done was for debatecon in 2023, and i don't know why it was discontinued. i think it would do a lot of the same positive stuff a reviewer's spotlight feature would do.
• old piece comment drive: staff pick an older piece that hasn't received engagement in a while (and preferably didn't receive much when it was new, either) and drive people to read/vote/comment on it. the person with the most insightful/thorough comment after a certain amount of time gets a special hat. i think wl currently has a pretty big problem with discoverability for older pieces that aren't part of a hub, and this doesn't systemically remedy that, but it helps a little and makes a fun event out of it.
• old canon revival drive: the same sort of event, but it's for an old canon that people haven't touched in a while, and it includes writing for the canon in addition to engaging as a reader. i really love the massive collaboration on stuff like the sss, but i also recognize that's a tough event to put together often, and i think this is a smaller-scale way to drive a similar sort of spirit.
• something like scp's butterfly squad roster for critters, staff and non-staff. right now, people who want crit and don't have friends willing to do it in dms kind of just throw their pieces into the void and pray someone has the time/energy/inclination to provide crit and the ability to make that crit useful, which increasingly doesn't happen very often. a more detailed and personalized roster would allow crit-seeking users to connect with people whose interests and areas of ability overlap with their own, and it would provide another mechanism by which the power of incentive can be used to give people special hats for engaging with site systems positively.

doing all of this would require more hands on deck than staff currently have, but my understanding is that this is known and in the process of being addressed.

a word on perception

for most of february, i was on one of my breaks from the discord server. i tend to keep my reasons for going on such trips into the wilderness confined to the dms of a few understanding friends, but i will disclose the reason for this most recent one: i was frustrated. i was frustrated by how long this thread was taking to get made, how little activity there seemed to be from much of staff, and how little urgency there seemed to be when it came to attending to anything. i was struggling to sit around and be contented with promises that things were in the works and just needed more time because i have already spent so long waiting, first for new staff to be brought on, then for wing three contest to happen, then for any sign that the feedback given in the first iteration of this thread was being translated into tangible action. i like talking to people in the discord about whatever we fancy, but i cannot treat wl purely like a social club because it has been too many other things for me. i felt myself crawling up the walls of my own skull looking at the discord, so i stepped away. i returned because, despite my issues with the apparent inertia, this place is still populated by a lot of wickedly creative and interesting people of a sort that i've never found elsewhere online, and i still feel that i have a lot to give when opportunities arise, if not as a writer then at least through venues like this.

my hopes for this site are, i feel, pretty modest. last year, we had three major events: the sss, wing three contest, and yuletide. i would be interested in not more than one more major collaborative event and one more major contest per year, with smaller events like writprompt interspersed between. right now, pieces tend to cap out at ten or 15 votes; i would like for that number to be in the 20s. right now, it seems like most staff responsibility is on the shoulders of around four people; i would like for that figure to be doubled, with non-staff organizers and critters as they are needed. right now, people tend to keep mostly to their own corners and spin their own wheels; i would like for there to be a little more of a balance between that and the collaborative element of what we do here, which i also think would boost site participation and help with some of my other hopes. i don't feel that any of this is excessive in its ambition, and i really don't want us to be a very large or overly bustling website — the slower, more relaxed vibe is a major part of this place's appeal over scp for me. if wl ever gets to a level of motion where it becomes infeasible to keep up with every new piece, where people begin splintering into sidechats because the main discord is too overcrowded, then i think we will have gone too far and lost a major part of the magic. however, i think that we can grow quite a bit before those concerns become material, and i don't think it'll take an enormous overhaul of preexisting infrastructure or a staff coup or anything like that. what i think it will take is a greater understanding among staff of how your work is perceived.

a thing that i am sure is easy to lose sight of as a member of staff is that regular users don't have access to any information you don't actively make available to them. staffchat isn't public, and the librarian's desk is never used as a public-facing hub for discussion — what we see is the posts you make on the forums and the announcements that you make on the discord. if most of those posts and announcements are made by one person, it looks like that person is doing all the work. if your contributions as a member of staff are mostly confined to staffchat, it looks like you've gone dark and aren't pulling your weight. when you say that you only need life stuff to let up in order to have the time and energy necessary to be more involved, but your wikidot activity continues to dwindle for months and years, and you only occasionally pop in publicly to be part of an event or handle some routine business, it looks like you've moved on from the site and are refusing to let go of the steering wheel. i don't know how true that actually is, and that's kind of a problem, right? in the face of such a dearth of insight, it's easy to assume that the people responsible for maintaining this place have flown the coup without giving the car keys to someone else, which is a very demoralizing and frustrating thing to get to thinking as someone who cares deeply about this place and the people who make it what it is. all of this is also assuming that it's not actually the case that staff is 50% inactives, which i don't have confidence in based on what i've heard from insiders, but i've already said my piece about the need to cycle out the truly inactive and bring new blood in.

i already expressed my desire for some form of regular update on what staff are doing in the discord earlier today, but i feel it warrants repeating. please talk to us. let us know what you're thinking of doing and what you're actually doing. this thread is a good step, but three months is a long time to wait for any sort of an update for people who log on every day. keeping everything contained in private channels and only handing down announcements when you're fully ready to pull the trigger on an action is, at least for me, extraordinarily painful, and i don't get the sense that staff feel the same urgency about this stuff that i do. i get the impression that the prevailing belief is that wl can always depend on the steady activity of at least a handful of lifers, and these people will be around whenever staff happen to be ready to act, but i don't know if that's actually true. we're already seeing some stalwarts either jump ship or decline in activity for reasons unrelated to drama, and they're not being replaced. the community is not preserved in amber while you're away; the stakes are that people are going to leave and not come back or have their absences filled by others. i expect that the pace of these steps can only be accelerated by so much, but steady communication and a defined sense of plan would make the weight much more bearable, at least for me. more than the stuff about the rating module and events, i hope that's your main takeaway from all of this. i don't want to accuse or badger anyone; i just want the library to be what i feel and hope it can be. i hope to look back on my brief absence and this post as stepping stones to a more vibrant, robust, and active community. thank you for reading this whole thing.

the best food i've had recently

this wonderful cheese plate i had as an appetizer at a restaurant just tonight. two different kinds of cheddar, dried cherries, nuts seasoned with christmas spices, dried figs, and bread fried in butter. to die for.

it's my goal to promote a cycle where we allow for a semi-regular community circle (perhaps quarterly or so) to get some official feedback and conversation on-site with more regularity, and also to serve as a repository for community input in a more accessible and legible fashion than discussion on, say, discord.

a brief recap of some of the points raised in the last community circle as well as an explanation for gaps in staff activity (please note that this section is directly copy and pasted from a staff post i made on the discord server, but here it shall be held for posterity):

basically immediately after the first community circle thread we had a really busy season with two large and time consuming events, and then into the new year we faced a few temporary staff shortages due to irl stuff, some of which persist, so naturally that has slowed down forward momentum. relatedly we understand that this means we need to find and onboard new staff. we want to avoid situations that have happened in the past with onboarding where new staff members can feel overwhelmed by discovering duties, responsibilities, and expectations of conduct piecemeal, so we are putting together procedures to make that onboarding process more coherent and smoother. we have a target for that by the end of february which means that once that is complete we will be able to look at bringing on new staff.

related to that is the idea that some staff members might be more in specific roles rather than just mods and admins. we are also strongly considering having community roles that arent strictly staff (doing the moderating and upkeep) but that do things like generate events.

i have noticed that there has been a big improvement with the general tone of discussion on the discord server which was a big concern for many people posting on the thread. additionally it seems that more people are more comfortable pinging or dming staff, which is something that we asked for, and it has led to active mods being able to handle things more directly and immediately more often.

i'm currently personally exploring solutions for a reading club that do not involve discord due to the age verification policy specifically targeting stages. twitch is a possibility. would be really interested in new staff or community organizers working on putting this together with me!

we are in discussion about some of the following things/some of these things are guaranteed but are waiting until prior steps are taken place like bringing on new staff:

• reworking the main page to feature more works

• changing the procedure of how we do features to bring in more community involvement

• writprompt changes (already beginning!) that involve more collaborative effort and deemphasize the contest/competitive part, as part of a broader effort to highlight collaboration and critique

• overhaul of the rating system, potentially up to and including removal

• comments of the week/month

in the interest of transparency some things that were raised that we are not considering:

• banning political discussion

• cutting off all connection with scp

• disallowing or acting against author agency regarding things like self-deletion

many of the things above are sea changes for the site that cut against years-long norms and expectations and if and when we roll it out, we want it to be done right. this isnt a promise but i'm suspecting some of our short-term slowdowns to resolve in the very near (next days and weeks) future at which point some of the things that have been started or set up from the list above will be completed or advanced.

please feel free to post below with any comments, feedback, questions, etc. we're going to keep it kind, constructive, and respectful as always. this time will be a bit less formal than the first as this circle serves slightly different purposes. however, if you choose to post, please conclude with your favorite food you have eaten in the last few weeks. this is of the utmost importance.

we welcome your thoughts and feedback knowing that together we can continue to make the wanderers' library even better!

from the time i joined the site, i knew i had found something special. aspects of me which i had to hide or bury in my real life were not just tolerated but celebrated by the community at large. my thoughts and explorations of gender, which often veer into "aggressively non-binary," were received warmly and positively, with many community members expressing empathy and understanding. many people indicated that they understood how i was feeling because they often felt the same way themselves! finally, i had thought to myself, i had found a group of people with whom i could be safer than i was in "real life", and with whom everyone in the community was treated more safely, more respectfully.

this is part of why the events of the last few months have been so emotionally challenging for me. multiple people have expressed a feeling of a lack of safety. there has been a ton of cross-chatter about side servers and such wherein hurtful or harmful allegations are made about one another. more and more it feels like i'm stuck in the middle of some sort of factionalized conflict, and i strongly dislike that feeling.

right now we all are hurting and we all are scared. not strictly by what's happened on-site, but by the world around us! many of us, especially those of us living with marginalized identities, have so much to be frightened of. but turning this fear on one another is not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. we all have enough to face trying to live our day to day lives without people who should be our allies working to tear us down behind our backs. to what end? can we not afford one another a little bit more good faith? can we not work together as a community to move past struggles rather than fracturing and splitting? i believe we could! if we cared to. but we all have to care to!

and this goes not just for people existing and chatting in a general sense but also for the art they create. sometimes we read something someone has written and it challenges our sensibilities and we discard or even speak against it. a question everyone needs to ask themselves when they read something that makes them feel this is way is: why am i having this reaction? this is part of why i rarely elucidate exactly what's going on in my poetry that i write (even though i consider my poems i post here to be fairly transparent): i think it's important to wrestle with your own interpretation and reaction to any given work and explore those things even if they make you feel discomfort, but it's also important to maybe assume a little bit of good faith from the part of the author. as just one example, one of the poems posted to the site many months ago now was, i felt, espousing¹ extremely bigoted and deleterious viewpoints toward gender identity and expression, but even with this read of the poem i gave the author room to breathe in my comment.

i am willing to give it all the benefit of the doubt since this is your first post here and perhaps it's unintentional,

but we aren't willing to give people who have posted and expressed their views directly many times over the same benefit of the doubt?

to that end i support any number of radical changes to things such as ratings, comment and crit culture, and contests going forward and will of course be interested in participating in and learning from community and staff discussion on these things. i don't think i have all the right answers but i think we can come to something better — and then give ourselves space to continue to evolve from there. i say this because i believe in the wanderers' library, because i think it's a pretty fantastic place, and at the end of the day i am proud to be a part of it and proud to have met all of you.

as an aside, i strongly disagree with any solution that involves the outright banning of political discussion. i think this is a complete non-starter, is entirely unrealistic at its core, is antithetical to the creation and discussion of art, and is something that, if it were to occur, i would not moderate or enforce.

sending so much love to everyone. we all need it. we all need that in our lives.

what am i listening to? well, haha, you got me! it's of course celtic and pan-european speed-folk band PerKelt.

I'll firstly start by saying that here I wont delve in some of the most serious topics, or on what I think is the correct approach to rebuild the site. I'll simply mention my experience and the little things that lead to me growing more distant and distant from the site. These are things which I do not believe need immediate adressing or even HAVE to be. It is me sharing my thoughts surrounding a place that meant a lot to me, and wish still did as much as in the past.

So, the main reason as to why I stoped regularly interacting with the community, is that it fell, in a way, like marketing. From experience, if you want your post to at least be read by a decent portion and even more so commented, you gotta become known. There isn't anything particularly bad with this however, i mean its part of our nature, I hardly see a measure that could fix this. If at least a guy you know is an active member posts, you will be more interested than if a random out nowhere did

The problem arrives with how draining it can be to be online nowadays, and how the rating system works too. Ive read many of the comments here, and a few have put emphasis on this being a site for new writers to learn and improve. But from my time on WL, I feel there wasn't much focus on the novice writer itself, rather mainly their work. The advice i was given for each piece was good, even the few times I received comments were very insightful and I greatly appreciate it, but when you finally decide to post, to make such a jump, you are exposing yourself. This exposurex this judgement from others, is one of the biggest fears everyone who starts writing has. And I dont say it for myself only, many of my friends in other servers are fearful of even sharing what they wrote to me, let alone in a public site with a more than decent following. And the reality is, ubless you are quite known or post constantly, it won't get much attention. Meaning, a site for beginner writers, writers with no reputations, only those with one stand out. This is a very complicated topic to solve, and maybe an unsolvable one. I don't expect a few discord moderators to discover the cure for artistical anxiety, and it's not the fault of those who become popular , but I do believe certain elements worsen this problem a lot and could be modified to be more friendly.

First problem, for me, is the voting system. I could list many reasons why I don't like it, but putting it straight forward: it makes posting a writing piece's ultimate goal to have as many positive votes as possible. You may argue that this is ridiculous, and I agree. That shouldn't be why you write. But in this day and age, teens especially (which I was one when I joined) are obsessed over numbers and fame. To go viral, to become known all around. And when u start writing, u aspire that. Even beyond loving what you do, and doing so for the love of the craft, there's nothing that feels better than people reading what you write, enjoying it, resonating with it, etc. So, having the voting system on top of every post, having its own distinct color, and even being there before any text appears. Its hard to not care for the voting. Especially because the more votes you have, the more chances even more shall read and comment on it. Tied to my previous point, someone will read the story with 20 votes over the one with 4 most of the time. And the reason for such a disparity isn't a difference in quality necessarily, but rather one of the authors being better known. Again, this leads to one being forced to interact with the server more and more, and to also post more in the hopes that you eventually become recognized sufficiently for people to check out your work.

The reality is, that the voting system does more harm than good. I feel even simple changes to it would improve the site immensively. Make it so its at the end of the post instead of the beginning, not be one of the first things that appearing when looking out for stories, etc. For new writers, its hard to not think they should seek for higher numbers when they are plastered everywhere. They may obsess over that when instead should work on having fun, improving, and receiving comments both critical and encouraging before and after finishing a work.

Now, voting isn't the only encouragement on WL. There are two others: events and the featured works of the month.
Back in my day, events were most of the time decided via amount of votes, but from what I've seen lately, such criteria has changed for the good, which I'm happy to see. But for the works of the month, while being a good idea, I feel it could be improved. Writing prompts were, imo, a better implementation that could be expanded or tackled in better ways. If the goal is to highlight good pieces from a certain period time, it all comes down to personal bias between posts that imo vary too much. What if, the prompts instead of being only a one word theme, were more interesting. Again, back to the idea of this site allowing writers to improve, what if the prompts gave different genres to tackle for the duration, certain liminations ("write a story with less than x amount of words", "write a story without a protagonist about a civilization" etc etc).

The last problem I wanna mention is that
When it comes to announcing your work has been posted, it's usually not very effective. Unless you are quite insistent, and keep bringing it up, most won't read it after a couple of days. Which can be quite discouraging for newer writers. One wishes it to receive lots of comments, have people point out what they like, what they dont, yadda yadda, only to most of the time fade into obscurity. This is also a problem thats difficult to solve, but is worth mentioning. The SCP community, on the contrary, many posts keep receiving comments to these day, even the less mainstream ones. Granted, thats due to the immense popularity and members difference. But SCP is our sister site, why can't we collab with it more often to gain more popularity? Sure, that will bring other, multiple problems, but such is life. I used to enjoy the more familiar vibes of the WL, and I would hate it for it to be lost, but people eventually leave. Ultimately thats why I did. I eventually grew out of it, decided to continue writing, yes, but for other projects, other places. For every problem mentioned here, there are 3 persons who I chatted with and greatly enjoyed doing so. Some of those, despite not still being in touch, still consider great friends who helped me pursue what I love doing the most.

These problems I mentioned if adressed I believe would allow more people to experience the wonderful side this community. Again, I haven't been active beyond reading announcements and the ocasional post, so I dont know the drama that has been unfolding, so I can't say if what I suggest here would improve on that, but a part of me feels like prioritizing helping others in their artistical journey as we progess our own is ultimately what unites us all.

I don't have much else to say. Sorry in advance if it's too messy and imprecise and for any grammar mistake. Thanks to everyone who helped me be the writer I am today. Love y'all, take care.

P. S.: listen to "Motor Psico" by Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota

-Styg