The current situation of forum critique is untenable. Zyn requested to staff that the crit forums be shut down for two weeks during the holidays because the volume of drafts was so intense, that it required her to personally answer 20 drafts per day just to keep up with the status quo.
Zyn has taken on a Herculean amount of responsibility to ensure that the wheels do not come off of forum crit. But a system that requires one person to take on dozens and dozens of cases just to get by is not sustainable. There are simply too many people needing draft critique, not enough reviewers, making the job a thankless task.
Most writers on the site probably would enjoy giving crit to drafts with some merit, which could be guided to completion. But frankly, most of the drafts that get posted are drivel that even the writer didn't put any level of serious thought or energy into. This is an enormous burden and wastes the talents of our incredibly dedicated Forum Crit team.
Staff needs to take immediate action in order to prevent our entire content creation system outside of the existing clique of writers in IRC from falling to pieces. The most immediate way to provide relief that a few people in admin chat came up with was to restructure the application process, changing the site permissions so that anyone with a wikidot account can comment but only those who are site members can create threads and edit/post pages. Obviously this would be a major change, but it would provide immediate relief to Forum Critique without preventing existing users and those with an interest in the site the ability to engage in the forums.
The recent threads for autocritique and shutting down the forums would probably provide temporary relief, but this is a systematic problem and if we have to shut down the forums for two weeks to cool off there needs to be immediate, major restructuring to ensure the same problems aren't present when the forums open back up again.
If anyone has any thoughts on how we can save our critique forums, we would love to hear them, because the problem is only getting worse by the day.
This discussion is open to anyone with access to 05command, will proceed for 3 days, followed by an Admin level vote on what immediate action to take.
e: extended the timer by another three days since tomorrow is Christmas and it seems like there could be other things occupying people's attention.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!