As of this posting, our sister site the SCP Foundation will start it's 9k contest in about one hour. Currently, Wing Two also has five slots left before it is full, meaning it would, on our usual timetable, most likely start in the next week or two, causing significant overlap with SCP's contest. This is problematic for two reasons: First, we were hoping to use the Wing Three contest to draw attention to the site, significantly pushing it to the attention of SCP audience members who might be less aware of us. Second, many of our users are also users of SCP who would be interested in participating in 9k, possibly reducing their ability to participate in both as they please.
Current thinking by staff is that, given the opportunity cost of losing attention/readership we might be able to gain from promoting our contest to SCP users as a major event, it may be desirable to delay the contest itself while opening up a "bare-bones" wing three. This would have blank .00 slots and lack the full "theming" that wings one and two have, though we would likely post some in-universe flavor to point to its current status. Posting would continue as normal, filling up the .1, .2, .3 slots for the next two months while the 9k contest plays out, and then, possibly after a bit of time to let writers recover/re-energize, we would announce our wing three contest.
This, to me, seems more desirable than the friction of 2 simultaneous "definitive" contests happening on the site, and though I think it will be a bit awkard in the short term, there are ways to alleviate that, and that this would be much better for the growth and health of the site in the long run, allowing us to try to better take advantage of an opportunity to increase our readership and bring new blood to the site, especially after a time where we've, in some ways, taken steps back in the past month or two.
However, this is a significant enough decision that staff would not want to do it unilaterally. We would like to hear user feedback on this, especially concerns and questions, and if there are other ideas or proposals people have about how this situation might be dealt with.
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