Having read all 60 posts, I agree with the rules as amended.

 

Who said anything about reading? I'm talking about making up our minds.

This all sounds terribly perfunctory; write the story, send it at the appropriate time, get on with your life for one month, or part thereof plus nine days and then you find out if anyone voted for your story.

So where is the thrill for the writers to find if anyone voted for them on a day by day basis. I've done 2 and there is real excitement for us average Joes in the daily check.


These are the guys who should get ,if no reward, at least a little ongoing excitement in their lives.

Its as if all that matters is winning the bloody thing and to me its not.

 

That is why people should (and a whole lot more do) comment on the stories as they read them. That (during that month) should keep the writers satisfied that they have done well. Then the voters can leave comments on the voter thread (if they want to) stating who they cast their vote for and encouraging others to vote. There will also be a new element of anticipation as we await the day the winner is announced. It will be like the Oscars or the Emmys or the Golden Globes. I think it all sounds exciting.

 

Not that PP sees this because I'm on his ignore list, but I'll answer anyway since others may benefit from the answer.

1. Nine days is plenty of time to make up one's mind. We're talking about voting for a story on a porn site, not picking a Pulitzer Prize winner.

2. No one is saying you can't get feedback about your story. You can post it here and get feedback via the forum. You can post it in the stories site and get comments and votes/ratings over there. You can get PMs from people telling you what they thought, or how they voted. You can see comments in the voting thread if people choose to publicly disclose their vote.

The idea of holding off reporting the results has good merit. Right now, out of how many posts...you seem to be the only voice of dissent. Perhaps you should consider that this has been discussed, debated, thought out, compromised, and dissected via 50+ PMs over the past several weeks...it isn't something that was just tossed together on a whim.

 

Nonsense Horse.

You can have all the nice encouraging comments you like but they're not a vote and last time I checked they don't count.

You and the fifty others don't seem to give a rat's arse about the writers.

Is it this American fixation with winning?

And 9 days is no where near long enough to make a decision; not when there are 25 stories and none of them has set you on fire.Or, being positive so many are just so good.

 

And here you were saying that winning isn't important to you, yet, now you say you're only interested in votes and not the comments.

Maybe I and 50 others care, and you are simply about stirring up shit, which is sure what it seems to be. You just dissed every other person who posted in this thread. Shame on you.

Yep, you're just going back to being a troublemaker and not really interested in being at all helpful. And as far as your anti-American comment, that just shows your ignorance. I'm surprised at you. Well, after dissing every one here, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I think I'll just stop responding to your whinings and instead work in a more positive way that is beneficial to the majority and doesn't insult everyone else here.

 

You really are unbelievable.
As usual you resort to personal attacks.

I stand by what I said, what's proposed has nothing in it for most of the entrants.

if you think that winning is all that matters the good for you. I think you're an idiot and so far I have seen nothing from you to suggest I'm wrong.

Note that applies to you only not the other 50 poster I'm supposed to have insulted.

 

I agree with most of the rules as stated. However, I do have one suggestion. At the end of Rule #1:

I think ALL votes by the cheater should be removed. If the result of getting caught cheating is to be no worse off than those who never cheated in the first place, where's the incentive NOT to vote multiple times?

 

So changed.

 

All right, all right boys. Stop and breathe.

PP has raised some points that should be addressed.

The original CAW concept was to have a fun event where people wrote stuff based on a common theme. Voting was included, in large part, to pick a member to run the following Challenge. The competitive nature of humans caused some people to look for an edge, not only in their writing, but also in their social networking -- they don't stop working just because their story has been submitted. A few created sock accounts to "stuff the ballot box." In the last one, several entries were removed, either because their writer's had gotten banned, or because they broke stated rules of that particular CAW, entering more than one story and casting pretty obvious sock votes. Yes, it's precious. Apparently, it's also necessary to try to prevent the cluster-fuck we had in CAW #10. Clearly stating rules, hopefully, will minimize confusion, bickering, and cheating.

SMC's mention of plagiarism wasn't about some idiot copying a story from somewhere on this site and submitting it as his own. She was concerned with some of the fly-by-night websites out there that have been known to rip off the contents of the entire front page of http://stories.xnxx.com/, assigning new user names to our work, while letting our forums alone. The proviso that you can post where you like answers that concern.

The CAW host doesn't put anything in a folder. He/she isn't actually posting the stories, just a list of links to them.

Nine days is the "voting period," which follows a "reading period" which will encompass as many days as there were stories submitted. If you have, say twenty entries, you then have twenty-nine total days to read and make up your mind. Your opinions of a story form as you read it, don't they? By the time you're done reading a group of stories, don't you have at least a vague idea of which ones deserve your consideration for a vote?

I understand your concern about writers getting feedback. As others have said, here and elsewhere, honest comments on stories are a huge reward to a writer and can often help him/her to hone his/her skills. In the ideas proposed so far, there's nothing discouraging people from giving a writer a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down publicly, from the time a story is first posted. The idea of a secret ballot is to give the writers a second chance at gratification.

This whole thing is being proposed to HELP the writers. The control part of it comes from a fairly obvious need to introduce some structure into the chaos that CAWs have become.

I can't speak for anyone but myself here, but winning, to me isn't everything. Sure, it was cool having my name up in lights for a little while, and I've "met" some interesting people because of it and probably expanded my readership.

BUT, I personally believe that some of my better stories have been ones that either didn't come close to winning a CAW, or weren't written for a CAW at all.

Some writers maintain they do it for the love of the craft, or to still the beast eating up their soul, or something. They claim they don't care who reads them or whether their stories are well-received. Okay, maybe. But I have to wonder why they bother to post their stuff, if that's really true.

To one degree or another, everyone who has posted a story on this site since it's inception is an attention-whore. We like our "attaboys." Getting good read counts, ratings, comments, and votes in a Challenge gives us a sense of satisfaction. Winning a CAW is the forum version of staying at the top of the front page on the Stories Site, so, yes, winning is, to many people, important.

 

This is good but ( you knew a 'but' was coming ,huh?) I go back to my original issue and that is ; where is the fun for the writers who aren't going to come anywhere and for whom a vote can mean so much.

You say it really is about them but plainly it isn't; its about organizational convenience.A nice comment is a nice comment but a vote! Wow, they can sit there gazing at the screen and know that someone somewhere though their entry was the best of the lot. With the best will in the world a nice comment doesn't carry that much weight.

On time frame, no, you're wrong.

If one rips into a story, skim along, doesn't engage, just looks for the plot and onto the end then rates it, well its an insult to the writer and a waste of time.

If you want to read them properly you have to get right into them, understand or try to the characters and, as the saying goes, where he's coming from (or she) and its a real effort. I don't know about you but for me it's quite draining; rewarding but draining. And it isn't what you want to do one day after another surely?

So on that basis alone I think the time frame from Posting to Close of Voting is too short and if the nine day period is to limit the agony then isn't that saying they (the writers) really do want to know how their little epic got on in which case wouldn't they really want to know day by day?

 

All the proposed rules in their present form seem fine to me, although to be honest most of them are so straightforward as to make it seem not wholly necessary to set them in stone like this. Although I always did like being able to have more than one entry, as the primary appeal of the challenge for me was always that it increases my readership about tenfold, and a lot of the time I have two (or three) different story ideas that are on-topic and could use the attention. But one entry per contestant has a nice sense of unity to it, and the reading period is time-consuming as it is, so I don't object all that strenuously.

Frankly, the only thing I have a problem with is having to wait until May to get the new one started. I guess I understand that doing this is actually a lot of work for the host and s/he (she in this case) appreciates a breather, but by the time CAW 11 draws to a close half the year will be gone with only two challenges to show for it. We're all here to write, so I'm for getting to the writing part as expediently as possible.

 

Black Ronin - I am personally glad to see a new CAW challenge coming up; as CAW 10 was the first one I ever entered I figured there would be almost a full year between them.

The last CAW brought out the best writers this sight has; may the next one bring even more.

 

I've need the last few weeks to decompress from the fall-out from the CAW, and from real life in general. My next priority was to create an SOP for all future CAW's so no one will question actions taken by the host. I agree it's sad that a writing exercise should have to come to this, but it was forced upon us. This is the first I've written anything; I haven't even worked on the story I was writing before the CAW.

I am trying to decide what the inspiration will be for the new CAW. I've got it down to a couple of selections. I hope it will be worth the wait.

 

I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a moment.

I will say, seeing that I received a vote is rewarding in its own special way. It gives a sense of accomplishment. I can only wonder what it's like to receive a dozen votes on an entry. Saying that, knowing the play by play of how the votes are tallying up is both detrimental and inspirational. Seeing 'Xmember' has several votes on the first day of voting compared with your own zilch isn't exactly a pleasant experience. Though when the last few days of the contest are rolling around and one or two people decide that what you've written is worthy of their (voting) admonishment, it is truly the best feeling in the world as far as this forum goes.

In the latest CAW10, I received many comments on my entry. A few notable members helped me to realize what power I have with my minimalist style. That in and of itself made entering worth my effort.

That is how most people tend to 'read' their stories. This is a porn site. If the guy isn't spewing loads of baby gravy into a tight fertile teen twat by the second paragraph, your story will most certainly be ignored. What you've written is judged not by the color of its book jacket but by the content of its pages.

I disagree with this to a point. I've read all of the entries in two days. In that time, I've already ruled out half of them. I read what is left again, a day or so later and some of those don't make the next cut. Usually, there are a handful left. I then go into the technical aspects. Punctuation, paragraph separation, overall content, dialogue, continuity...

In seven days I usually have one or two entries to decide between. Nine days is actually too long in my opinion but it seems fair enough.

Seeing the results is both detrimental and inspirational as I've already addressed above.

 

You make a good point.

Two CAWs ago ELP wrote a great story that ran away with the vote right from the beginning. It's my belief that if someone comes to the voting section, sees that one story is a virtual runaway train with little chance of being caught, they might not bother reading all of the stories and vote. Authors typically will read stories and vote. But others might look and go "Oh, well, this is already over, what's the point?" and move on. THAT's one thing I think can be avoided by non-disclosure of the actual results until the end.

We're talking about 9 days of not knowing results. I think we can all live in suspense for 9 days. As others have pointed out, there will be pseudo-exit polls where bits and pieces will be found. And in comments too.

Quite frankly, I'd be more than happy if we abandoned the voting entirely and simply had topics to write about. I think it is the voting, etc. that gets everyone hyped up here. Take the voting away. Come up with a way to announce new writing topics, and let people write. I care far more about comments than votes. Hey, a vote is nice...I know that. But it takes a click. A comment takes someone actually putting to words, good or bad, something about your story.

But I feel I'm in the vast minority about doing away with voting entirely, so, the next best thing is to try and make things as fair as possible.

 

I've not read all the post on this tread so I don't know if this has been discussed but I'd like to propose an idea that I proposed a long time ago.

1) Every story is posted with its own poll.

2) After reading a story (and while it is fresh on their minds) the reader gives the story a point value from 1 to 5.

5 points if they thought the story was excellent.
4 points means the story was very good.
3 points means it was good.
2 points means it was just Okay.
1 point means they didn't like it.

At the end of the challenge the votes are totaled and the story with the most cumulative points ... wins.

This is not some new weird idea. This kind of voting is used in many professional contest and it works just fine. (IE Professional Photographer use this method to judge prints.) In a sense, a lot of the TV contest work this way. The judges vote on each contestant’s performance and it is the cumulative vote that determines the winner.

Just a thought.

HD

 

I like it. Bet horse does too:excited:

 

HardDrive - an idea worth consideration.

 

Hey HD,

The problem with this is that a mediocre story could win over an outstanding story. How?

Let's say I write a mediocre story. (Setting myself up there, eh?) Let's say Writer A writes a great story. I, however, use good marketing and I get, oh, 80 people to come and read and then vote for my story. The average vote is 2, so I get 160 votes. Writer A does no promotion, and only 30 people vote for that story, but they are all blown away and all vote 5. 150 votes. I win 160 to 150.

Is that what we would want to potentially have happen? My example might be a bit extreme, but something like it could happen.