After some discussion in SSSC this morning, I'm going to build a little tool to assist with quickly providing relevant boilerplate crit. You'll be able to select the things wrong with the piece and it will output the final comment. I do need some assistance on the desired categories and comments.

• Increase the usage of 'Autocrit' and boilerplate responses, particularly when the drafts are miles away from viable.
• Put some burden on the submitter to answer some questions ahead of any crit being performed. What is the concept in a nutshell? What are you wanting to evoke in the reader? Get a baseline of information that must be included in a draft or even just an idea to be reviewed. The submitter really should be putting more effort into their work than the crit staff are. Threads that do not answer the basic questions in advance are locked and told to try again with all the stuff we need to get a real idea of what we're reviewing. We do not have to make the process overly burdensome, but there should likely be more accountability on the part of the submitter than there is now.
• Raising the barrier to entry by some amount, but not via a queue system. Something that would more strongly challenge potential members on, at the very least, their reading comprehension and willingness to read required materials. This could be by going closer to how the site worked in previous years, where there were multiple articles that constituted required reading. We could intersperse several sets of instructions across each of them.
• Requiring first-time submitters to either use I&B, get vetted, and submit a draft for review, or have them pass a more complex test that would show their ability to read and write at or around a college level and exempt them from this process.

Things I don't like: The suggested allowing of non-members to comment. I think the reasoning against this has been thoroughly expanded upon, just adding my dissent as well.

So, I've been looking at the recent flood of drafts and noticed a common theme among most of them. The majority of new-user drafts are low-quality attempts to get their idea included in one of the SCP-based games. This likely stems from Mark, Pewds, et al. doing reviews/let's plays. Now, don't get me wrong, I've seen users who rode the wave of the Markiplier Incident from a few years ago become high-rated authors. This is not the norm, obviously.

I think the best way to fix the issues of SCP game shoehorns would be the requirement to post your concept to the I&B forum before putting it in the drafting forum. This would allow us to say whether an idea is just going to turn into a generic monster or not without having to read through an entire draft. Possibly this could be the case for the first 2 to 3 months on the site. This would give newbies the chance to learn without having to force more experienced users to go through the process any time they want some feedback.

I've long-since thought that the application could easily be brought back to something a little more substantial, like the old days, albeit not nearly as harsh or difficult. Just enough to make new users prove that they're worth the trouble.

Well, to be honest I would not be where I am now if I didn't cut my teeth in the forums. I have also seen quite a few users start out without much experience, but with some guidance (and a staff post or two) they became great assets in the idea forum. While it is definitely true that many users just cause problems and then leave after a month or less, there are also users who like me who improve over time and (possible even) become staff. And processing apps like this would also take a fair amount of time to do properly. So it could cause even more problems for the admins who have to read through these and accept them. We either need more admins, or less applications for something like this to work properly (at least from my point of view).

There isn't really a good way that I can see to predict whether someone is going to be Totally Excessive Work, Not Excessive Work, or Work But Worth It, at time of joining/application.

So, I've been looking at the recent flood of drafts and noticed a common theme among most of them. The majority of new-user drafts are low-quality attempts to get their idea included in one of the SCP-based games. This likely stems from Mark, Pewds, et al. doing reviews/let's plays. Now, don't get me wrong, I've seen users who rode the wave of the Markiplier Incident from a few years ago become high-rated authors. This is not the norm, obviously.

Second observation here is the application process. With such a simple process, anyone can skim the Rules pages, find the passcode, plug it in, wait a day, and tiptoe freely through the tulips.

I've long-since thought that the application could easily be brought back to something a little more substantial, like the old days, albeit not nearly as harsh or difficult. Just enough to make new users prove that they're worth the trouble.

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, right here, makes me think that a solution is right around the corner, and I hope my idea can help.

ETA: Of the 63 full crits I've done in the last 30 days, maybe about a third of them really showed promise. Just my two extra cents.

Now.

What if forum crit was to set a schedule for its members? A time allocated to each member of the team when they should be helping out on the forums. Part of the issue, aside from just burnout and other things, are that critstaff simply don’t have the time scheduled or planned to crit.

Obviously, such a schedule would be flexible, but holding ourselves accountable for certain times of day/the week to be doing crit might help everyone be more active.

If that doesn’t work, we can also try setting a baseline amount of critique forum crit members need to accomplish to remain on the team (barring outside circumstances and such). Something like 1-3 drafts a week minimum?

edit: This was a very random and spur of the moment thought that I had, and I am aware it has nothing to do with the queue system above

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.

Bad idea. This just makes it that much easier for trolls to run loose in the discussion threads.

2.

I put forth the idea of requiring that new authors submit concepts to the Ideas and Brainstorming forum before they can make a draft thread for a sandbox draft.

Zyn has put forth this idea twice; as the captain and primary worker on Forum Crit, she knows what she's talking about. If you're going to admin fiat anything, admin fiat this requirement. Here's how it could work: first, authors would be required to receive a positive response in the I&B thread for their idea, and then link their I&B thread in their draft crit thread as proof. Any threads that don't fulfill this requirement could simply be locked, and users that attempt to spam such threads could be disciplined.

3.

3. Locking the forums for a day every week would improve our ability to catch the forum back up to a good place, give forum staff a chance to relax, would not cause much trouble for staff or users if it didn't work out, and would could be easily reverted.

This is a great idea that is, again, supported by the captain of Forum Crit. Let's lock the forums once per week for a month and see how well it works to stem the flood on the crit forums. If it works well, we continue the program. If it doesn't work well, we open the locked day up again. As far as I'm concerned, if someone doesn't have the patience to wait for a day, then they don't deserve to have their article critiqued - and more than likely it wouldn't have been worth the effort to do so, elitism be damned.

4.
I fully support a queue system. Let's systemize it the same way we systemized Deletions so that we don't get 100 people coming in once a week and instead get a steady, controlled flow of new users. Extreme growth has been a matter of some concern for some time now and I'm fine with testing this as a way to help control that growth without causing outright stagnation.

As one of the primary drivers of the autocrit discussion, I think it’s also worth discussing a potential shift in forum crit objectives. Right now, the current objective is to ensure all drafts get replies. While this is something that is an easily measured metric, it also means that significant forum crit effort goes to drafts that probably won’t make it anywhere.

We should begin considering alternative metrics that don’t place so much stress on forum crit, as the current system will continue to be an eternal effort that no amount of incentive will ever solve in the long run.

The part of this I would like for everyone to see here, more than anything else, is that this idea can easily be reverted with almost no issues. So if there is enough support for this idea, we can try it for a half a month. Then we can see if there are more cold posts or complaints about the system. And if it turns out that this idea is not working as planned, it can be reverted without giving anyone much (if any) more work.

I’ll be posting my thoughts on the main issue later.

After the cliche contest and holidays, I can maybe take some time and work on doing at least forum crit a week. That might help.

On another note, I know our enemy is the dual-headed monster of growth and decline, but would limiting the amount of people who can post on the site to established members for just two weeks really kill us or our reputation that badly?

I believe the use of these days off is more to give us catch up time if things get bad than a way to get less drafts.

On the user end, coming in and finding the forum closed for a day will have one of two results:

1) The user waits until the next day to make their post

Or

2) the user ends up not making their post at all
2a) either because they went to pms/chat or
2b) because they get frustrated and give up on the feedback altogether.

Outcomes 1 and 2a just spread the same amount of work around (or delays the work by a day) while making the user jump through an extra hoop. 2b increases frustration among the userbase and encourages coldposting.

So there's no outcome to regular forum closure where I can see the pros outweighing the cons. Making it an infrequent thing (like once a month) would just cause the same problems less often and doesn't seem like it would make enough of a difference to justify doing in the first place.

Edit: a regular "clean the forum Thursday" or whatever where everyone encourages each other to get it done is a good idea (maybe an unofficial day of the week where every crit staff and/or staff in general are supposed to knock out a draft before logging into chat), I just don't think we should close the forum to do it.

As for the suggestion of a que, I can see better organisation greatly increasing the efficiency in staff teams. Perhaps implementing a que system to reviews outside of the staff teams could add to benefits of this?

and we'd be left with just as many drafts when the forum reopens

I believe the use of these days off is more to give us catch up time if things get bad than a way to get less drafts. It is much easier (at least in my experience) to keep the forums in order if most of them are on the front page. Users are more likely to critique them just because they catch their eye that way. This is also to make sure that people like Zyn can have a day to work on their own things rather than constantly check on the forum.

A simpler way to ease the pressure would be to simply raise our expected turnaround time

This could also backfire. I see users bumping threads after as little as 8 hours after they first post, so adding to the wait time would likely just cause more users to get impatient and bump threads or spam PMs at staff. This would also by nature likely also cause staff to wait longer to bother critiquing drafts that they don't like, creating a bigger pileup when we finally need to get them done.

I think a featured spot to highlight an article of choice - somewhere visible like the front page - is our ideal solution because it involves a tangible reward. We all love our mods and team captains, but I'm skeptical that any amount of recognition will work as sufficient incentive compared to the enormous energy drain involved in forum critique, so a more concrete reward would be a really good idea. Those feature highlights really do translate into upvotes, which for better or worse are a valuable enough currency around here to buy labor with. I don't think it's a magic bullet that will solve the whole problem itself, but it would probably make a dent.

- get more people actively reviewing in the forums. I hope the headpat/reviewer spotlight system will work well for this.

- formalize a queue so we don't get a repeat of the forum/site slam.

- figure out when we can do forum "rest days" to give the reviewers more breathing room. I'm fine with having these be just once a month or the like rather than once a week.

Also (and this is something that isn't totally necessary, but I did it anyway) I had a copypasta I'd send out with each acceptance:

Welcome to the SCP wiki. If you would like to be a site author, please use the Ideas and Brainstorming forum to first check your concepts before drafting: http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/c-89000/

And if I was feeling up to it, I'd check for sandboxes and send authors who already had a sandbox a simple copypasta PM with further information on the writing process.

I believe the upcoming contest was mentioned in the monthly admin-captain meetings, which Zyn attended

Yep. And in the most recent one, the response to me exhibiting concern was someone saying, "hey, you knew what you were getting into when you became captain".

I understand that it was meant as a joke. Still was pretty aggravating and solidifies how hard it is for me to ask for help when I get reactions like that.

(Also, if we do this, we may have to assign days, so, like, zyn doesn't let in fifty in the morning, and roget then lets fifty in that night.)

JS not needing permission to send a pm telling folks to “quit their behavior.” This would be used rarely and would need to be logged and sent to OS after it is given to the forum spammer.

While that definitely could be useful, make sure to realize that the reason we start out on JS is to see whether we can be trusted with more official tools such as this. I could see this being changed to letting team captains give certain JS permission to do such things. But I can also understand if that still feels like a little too much power for a JS to have. It really depends on the amount of trust that staff think we can be trusted with.

This will, of course, result in the ideas and brainstorming having more threads but, it appears to be a bit more manageable in comparison to draft forums

While it is faster to critique a I&B sometimes, realize that there are some fairly big caveats to that statement. If you give critique and they reply back with some questions or new ideas, you should be there to answer their questions. That can last for several days or even weeks at a time. Also, I currently do around 60-80% of the critiquing on the I&B forum. So we will need to get staff working quite a bit more on that forum if we plan on using your suggested idea.

maybe a critting-style guide that explains how each person critiques drafts differently so that newbies see all the different styles and form their own from them.

Zyn and I are currently working on something along this line (for the drafting and I&D forums respectively). The issue is that Zyn will need some time to actually get something like this done. She has proven herself to be superhuman, but even she has limits. I would be happy to see other staff adding in some guides on their own crit style as well, but we don't want to confuse newer members if they see so many different ways to critique an idea. Newer users may not know how to judge different situations well enough for something like this to be effective. So we will want to at least work very closely together to make sure we clearly state that these are just our personal style of critiquing and they should not be copied word for word but rather be used to show the general style someone experienced with the forum uses to critique.

All of the above suggestions require additional incentives on our part. Zyn mentioned that things are alright if we go by a queue system instead of accepting 100 apps at once. Might I suggest that we implement a more formalize queue system process first and foremost(removing the need for harder applications, just like a max # of acceptances per day or week), and then add on these suggestions (locking forums for one day a week, headpats)? I mostly want to go with whatever Zyn states will be most helpful to her in the order that is claimed by her.

Edit: Letting non-site users comment sounds like a terrible idea.

With that out of the way, the hardest thing for me about critting is bad to mediocre drafts without a stated concept or direction. I would very much like to require that people provide a quick two to three sentence description of their idea and where they're going with it.

Something like "This is a statue that moves if you don't look at it, even if you blink. It's supposed to be scary because it kills you if you even blink, and mysterious because of the stuff that shows up in its cell. The format is intended to imply the existence of an organisation, maybe even multiple types of weird monster."

Otherwise, a lot of the time I've found myself just correcting outright mistakes and just saying the concept "needs to be more conceptually coherent" (because I don't know what you're aiming for at all!) and it's not necessarily the most helpful feedback I could output, given just a little more to work with.

TL;DR: I need to know where you are going if you want directions.

EDIT: Letting non site members comment sounds like a nightmare. Be prepared to delete fifty thousand comments of the same slurs every time you sign on.

EDIT EDIT: Another suggestion! If most staff did, like, one draft a week, in addition to crit team, this could potentially decrease the specific workload on crit team greatly.

The problems here are twofold: the issue of the crit forums and the issue of Zyn being overworked. I'd like to address the latter as I don't really know how to solve the long term issues with the former. Zyn does way more than should ever be expected of her and the people that should be handling some of the stuff she does needs to step up. She handles front page management when that should be CO's job (and is even listed as such), she handles a disproportionate amount of disc and non disc matters compared to the rest of the disc team (just this week she and I tried to get someone to send a pm in the Q from unity thread and no one that read the thread or saw our staff chat messages could be arsed to do a 2 minute job, so she had to do it herself), and on top of all that is the pillar of the help forums. Not to mention she handles a lot of applications, a lot of the deletions, etc. To do all this she's made huge personal sacrifices to her free time and her own personal ambitions with regards to her writing and participation in this community. That isn't fair, sustainable, or right. Everyone who is responsible for one of those roles needs to step up and do more, and stop passively allowing Zyn to do their share of the work simply because she's willing.

I get it, we don't get paid for our labor (which ideally we should be and hopefully someday will be, but that's another discussion) and we're busy people. But as someone with an NGO background, volunteer work shouldn't be a license to get lazy. And harsh as it sounds, yes there are quite a few cases where laziness has exacerbated this situation. Zyn has a full time job and still does all that she does. Magnus has an extremely strenuous job and a new wife and he still managed to update Helen to replace Jarvis for us, among all his other tech team duties. Conwell quietly managed the entirety of the deletions process for years while also doing a ton of wikiwalk work, which despite the disrespect it gets in every single promotions thread (at least one person always leaves a comment saying they don't want to promote someone for being "just" on wikiwalk) is some of the most strenous and time-intensive work this wiki has ever seen, while getting through med school. Meanwhile there's plenty of people who spend hours shitposting/chatting in staffchat but don't take the time to review a draft/idea thread or two despite that being one of their team's responsibilities.

Frankly, we have a problem where a minority of staff do a majority of the work. If you're among the majority that do the minority, I'm not asking you to become a hardcore workhorse. Just try to do a bit more, a little a day. That alone goes so far in doing your fair share and reducing the burden on people like Zyn. To quote a great man, If you have a good excuse don't use it. For Zyn, Conwell, and Magnus, if you take issue with how I used your cases to demonstrate the extent of your hard work I sincerely apologize. I could never and would never presume to speak for any of you, and I understand if you disagree with my overall argument here.

Edit: Just want to emphasize that obviously plenty of staff members do work hard, that some people are genuinely too busy to participate much, and that sometimes a hiatus is necessary and perfectly justified.

A monthly (and publicized) "Head Pat" award for the users who provided the most crit to new threads that month. Users submit a link to their crit to… whoever, which is reviewed by a squad of thankless JS. Shitcrit is automatically disqualified.

I'd actually like something like this, but a more "spotlight reviewer" sort of thing. I'd be happy to receive name nominations, both self-sent and from people who received feedback, to tally up at the end of a month.

Personally, as greater incentive for experienced authors to give quality feedback, I would like for these spotlights to happen on the Monthly News pages, near the top with the featured articles. Even better if we can link the author page too if the reviewer has one. I already have names in mind for retroactive implementation of this for November.

The big problem I'm seeing here (that can actually be solved without choking on our own boots) is that we don't have enough people actually giving crit, primarily because a lot of the more veteran users don't quite want to give forum crit.

That's the issue. I've been trying to get a series of essays up to make crit more appealing, especially to newer members, maybe make a "So You Want to be a Reviewer?" thread stickied at the top… but if I'm buried in other staff stuff, it'll never happen. We need more consistent manpower.

And based on today's showing in the forums, we have that manpower. But it's not fair to just leave all the work to the same people over and over just because it's convenient. And it shouldn't take me having an existential crisis to kick people into helping out.

Even if you were to somehow stem the flow of newbies, that wouldn't change the fundamental problem that forum crit is fundamentally unappealing to give.

I've tried to encourage co-authoring to help with this, and I've gotten a good 20+ co-authored works myself through offering a collab in draft threads for works I really liked, but I just don't have the time to even work on my own writing anymore and most people don't bother looking at draft threads anyway.

3. Locking the forums for a day every week would improve our ability to catch the forum back up to a good place, give forum staff a chance to relax, would not cause much trouble for staff or users if it didn't work out, and would could be easily reverted.

I actually really, really like this idea and would be happy to handle the locking/unlocking of the forum to facilitate it.

Zyn suggestes freezing apps until after the winter break, and do the same for future floods.

Definitely call me on this if I'm wrong, but I don't think I ever suggested this. I personally have been accepting apps on a queue and that worked out fine. Then every once in awhile someone just accepts 100 at once, the forums get slammed, and I go asking about why we can't just use a queue. The last time that happened, someone told me that they didn't want to make people wait.

I put forth the idea of requiring that new authors submit concepts to the Ideas and Brainstorming forum before they can make a draft thread for a sandbox draft. I suggested that because a lot of the time, we already send people with drafts back to I&B because they need that conceptual help. I suggested this twice:

• http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-8266979/writing-help-forums-i-b
• http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-6103772/writing-help-forum-process-change

I admit that I'm getting a little fed up with solutions being proposed by people who aren't actually participating in the draft forums, rather than asking what the Forum Crit team would need to better function smoothly.

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.

Half as much. One week, per this thread: http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-9501062/draft-forum-holiday-hiatus

Also, I've never had to answer 20 draft threads myself per day. In total I have covered a mix of ideas threads, draft threads, and PMs, often around 20, but it was never 20 draft threads a day myself. I'm not that crazy or efficient.

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 isn't true. The majority of the drafts that are posted are more in the middle-level, but there is a fairly equal distribution. I tried making a quick list here: http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-8520350/discussion:autocrit#post-4059138 based on a handful of drafts I reviewed. The garbage fire stuff takes, comparatively, much less time to critique.

My main concern is:

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

I feel like this would be more trouble than it's worth, since it will more likely generate additional work for Forum Crit staff who are going around addressing low-quality critique. And we see a lot of low-quality critique get posted, hence all those non-disc record threads.

Also, given that most of the admins aren't really around that often… wouldn't that just pile up more work for the admins as well and lead to more problems on that end?

First, I think the line "forum on the brink of collapse" may be putting it little dramatically. I had IRL stuff to work on for a while which lowered the amount of threads in the ideas forum that I could process. This made Zyn have to pick up the slack. But now that I am back I have the ideas forum back in shape. There shouldn't be any articles even making it to the third page for a good while. This will help Zyn and the other staff on the critiquing team focus on the drafting forum.

While it has admittedly gotten quite hectic with so many drafts and ideas, I think changing anything to the degree people are suggesting could cause more problems than solutions. Letting anyone comment creates way too many opportunities for trolling. And adding a 30 day minimum before being able to use the forum just invites new users to spam chat or PM staff for help constantly. Both of these ways would likely cause a larger headache then it's worth. I also don't believe Zyn has suggested not allowing apps in, but rather asked the forum be closed for a week. I realize that this would likely also create a gigantic stream of people after the break asking for critiques (as well as the chat and PMing issues I already talked about), but this idea is meant for us to have some time to catch up before we begin getting a bunch of requests again. So I would have to agree with Zyn's idea if I were to agree with any.

And if I could see any idea working out here, it would be having the forum be closed for one day a week. It would have the same reasoning as Zyn's current idea, to give crit staff some catch up time or take a break. Doing this would allow us on the forum team to catch up on our work at busy times and let us have a day to relax or work on other projects after we finish. There would also be a minimal change in the amount of posts being added immediately after the break ends (due to it being a scheduled situation that people can work around). Any other way could just cause headaches that we haven't even thought of down the line. This way provides a simple yet effective way to keep the forums up to snuff. Plus, if we find that it doesn't work, we can just revert the rule with almost no consequences. This will affect the site's users much less than coming up with an entirely new app process or forcing people to wait several months to even use the forum.

So just to summarize everything I talked about:
1. The forum should be getting a fair amount less hectic soon.
2. Adding any major changes to fix this problem will likely cause more issues than solutions.
3. Locking the forums for a day every week would improve our ability to catch the forum back up to a good place, give forum staff a chance to relax, would not cause much trouble for staff or users if it didn't work out, and would could be easily reverted.

That's just my viewpoint of it however.

The big problem I'm seeing here (that can actually be solved without choking on our own boots) is that we don't have enough people actually giving crit, primarily because a lot of the more veteran users don't quite want to give forum crit.

There's this idea (unfortunately with some merit) that the majority of crit threads are started by clueless newbies whose drafts are littered with countless errors, and that any actual criticism you dish out is gonna be either ignored or challenged by the OP. Staff have already partially addressed this with boilerplating, but even so, almost nobody likes pushing against a brick wall. Mann's right: nobody gets payed to do this, and I seriously doubt this falls under a "mutual aid" umbrella either.

Indeed, expanding on that: what incentive does the average user have to perform forum crit? It is a thankless, mostly invisible job that more often than not burns out like a candle in the wind. Nobody upvotes you for forum critique, rarely do people reciprocate for crit like they do in chat, and what rare plugs you get as a result of crit (see: Hippo) are usually gained from the more immediate and intimate IRC-crit. Even if you were to somehow stem the flow of newbies, that wouldn't change the fundamental problem that forum crit is fundamentally unappealing to give.

All this said, I can think of a few solutions off the top of my head:

• A monthly (and publicized) "Head Pat" award for the users who provided the most crit to new threads that month. Users submit a link to their crit to… whoever, which is reviewed by a squad of thankless JS. Shitcrit is automatically disqualified.
• Get rid of the drafts forum entirely. I don't want to do this any more than the rest of us, but it'd force new users to be more proactive about who they ask for crit, leaving the burden of "did this get crit yet" off of Zyn's herculean shoulders.
• Instituting a mandatory queue system of drafts, and locking the queue when the number gets too big for its britches. Considering how peepee doodoo our structural customization is (until PF actually goes through, and that's a big "until"), that might need to be handled offsite.
• Some system of bot upvotes that counts critgiving? If there's anything this site's told me, it's that people go apeshit for numbers that go up. It'd also be a good way for Zyn to track ButtSquad potentials.

1. Growth is life, stasis is death. If we don't get new members on the site, the wiki will die. No longer allowing people into the community will kill it. We may slow the rate of growth, but we dare not stop it entirely. Not accepting apps for the duration of winter break is potentially doable, but we need to make sure we aren't killing our growth.
2. Too much growth will also kill us. If we can't manage the community, chaos reigns, Zyn dies of fatigue, and we'll end up with a level of quality to rival the Holders series.
3. We are not currently equipped and able to handle the drafts in the forum with sensible critique. Zyn's been handling it nearly on her own. We've tried getting her additional help, but it's only gone so far.
4. Nobody is paying us for this. It is unreasonable to expect Zyn or anyone else to sacrifice their mental health for a volunteer hobby.
5. Much of our community is unable to give good critique. Either they aren't good at communicating what will or will not improve an article, or else they don't even know what makes an article good or not and will end up encouraging low-quality articles because they don't know any better.

The idea behind letting anyone with a wikidot account comment is that they could then feel they were part of the community. We would then make the application process more difficult so to slow the flood of people actually making articles. This does have a few issues:

• A more difficult application process means more work on that end. Admins would need to step up to process these applications in a timely manner.
• A large number of people who join do so because they want to write. This may or may not slow the flood as much as we hope.

Zyn suggestes freezing apps until after the winter break, and do the same for future floods. This would at least provide temporary relief, but we'd need to make sure it didn't hurt growth too much. It also leads to a bottleneck of apps that will have to be dealt with after the crisis is over.

Another idea occurs to me: People are not allowed to post articles or put them up for critique until they've been members for at least a month or two. I don't think this is necessarily a good idea, since we've had a lot of good writers who just showed up one day, posted an amazing article, and went away. It also could feed into criticisms of the site that we're elitist and cliquish. We'd also need to actually enforce the rule. I throw it out mostly as a last resort if none of the other ideas work.

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.