Community Building Challenges

i saw sparks:

I don't think people should need a badge on their profile in order to want to be a part of something. It's cool if people get something once they've completed the challenge or whatever, but can people not identify who's a part of the challenge and who's not from discussion?

I mean, we don't get badges on here for the people that do NaNoMo, but it's still kind of obvious to spot who's involved from their sigs or who posts in those related threads.

But you do get badges if you do NaNoWriMo - there are lots of graphics on the official website, both for when you're participating and afterwards if you win. I've seen a lot of people put them on their profile as well as a lot of people who add their wordcount to their signature during November - it's good motivation and it definitely helps you befriend other people taking part in it.

@ i saw sparks
At first glance, no, no one would know that.

I think it would be nice if there was a way to have a monthly writing prompt for the site, and a way to view all the stories inspired by said prompt in one place (ie, come up with a unique tag so we can organize them or something). Maybe we could come up with some kind of submission process for users to generate the prompts.

Kurtni:

I think it would be nice if there was a way to have a monthly writing prompt for the site, and a way to view all the stories inspired by said prompt in one place (ie, come up with a unique tag so we can organize them or something). Maybe we could come up with some kind of submission process for users to generate the prompts.

I love that idea.

@ Kurtni
THIS!

In a Lj community I go on, we have a yearly Thon, where people summit can prompts anonymously for a couple of weeks, then they're all compiled into one post and people can choose one at a time to write something based on it. Would something like that be possible here?

FairyFeller:

In a Lj community I go on, we have a yearly Thon, where people summit can prompts anonymously for a couple of weeks, then they're all compiled into one post and people can choose one at a time to write something based on it. Would something like that be possible here?

Going of the of a 'thon', I think doing a Mibba read-a-thon would be pretty neat. And now that we can see word-counts for stories, it may actually be do-able. Of course, a lot of it would depend on the honor system, but if they can do it for NaNo, why not here.

Yeah, it would be awesome if users got something from finishing a challenge. Also, I think that it would be great if users get an update on their My Mibba about the contests that the Magazine/Mibba holds.

I don't know. My ideas mostly suck.

@ usagi no yousei
In my opinion, one of the primary points of these hypothetical community building challenges is that users participate in them to strengthen the community rather than earn a prize as with contests.

While I'm not opposed to users getting prizes related to community building challenges, I think treating them as a necessity would somewhat defeat the purpose.

I think prizes/rewards/acknowledgement is kind of necessary. I love the idea of everyone participating simply because they want to interact with other Mibbians, but realistically, I think we'd get far more participation if users got something out of it (ie, points or a profile badge, or even just a list of members who completed the challenge for 'bragging rights').

I don't think it defeats the purpose though, because being listed in a magazine article as a participant or having a ribbon on your profile that says you did blah blah blah isn't a huge gain or an epic prize, it's more a token of appreciation for making Mibba fun.

This is kind of small detail though, and Dujo would have to plan that, so maybe it would be productive to discuss other aspects of this. As an administrator who would be involved in planning this, I'd really like specific ideas on what kinds of challenges you'd like to do. i saw sparks. has made some great suggestions in that respect. Would you like seasonal challenges? Daily/weekly/monthly prompts? Blogging challenges? I'd really like ideas on how to get all types of writing involved in the community building. On the magazine contests, we always try to balance out story/poem contests with article/blog contests, and it can definitely get tricky.

I think by having a prize, you'll get tons of people to participate, and that will indirectly build the community.

I definitely think there should be a balance between story/poem and article/blog contests, but how to get everyone to participate in all of those I don't know. I also think that weekly would probably be best.

@ Kurtni
I like FairyFeller's idea about submitting. So maybe whenever a new challenge begins, there could be a place to submit ideas, and then randomly a few could be selected and turned into a poll for users to vote on, and the top could be the prompt chosen for that challenge? Of course, I like the idea of changing it up, like if it's near a holiday, having the challenge be about that holiday coming up, or random themes like friendship, hate, love, something to do with whatever season the challenge falls in.

Oooooh, I dunno if he'd be down for it, but maybe every now and again we could let Dujo pick the theme of the challenge, like a Dujo's Pick type thing

I'm not sure how I feel about doing it weekly, so I'm thinking either every month, or every other week.

@ ladyschrei
I think getting prompts every week would be good, even if it's not for a contest, but just to see what others are thinking and for anyone to get inspiration from, even if they are just "leftovers" of the random prompts that weren't picked that round or whatever.

I also think Dujo's Pick would be cool.

Maybe we could have weekly general prompts, like 'love' or 'travel', and a more specific monthly one like a quote or something.
Also, would there be word limits with the challenges, and would there be a separate area on the site for them or would they be in the Writing Contests with the staff contests?

@ FairyFeller
I think it would work best if official, Mibba-wide challenges had their own section, but we may have to improvise if we want to start doing things like this for now.

I would love to get the community feeling back to this site! And I would love to do the secret santa thing! :D

Maybe we could have Secret Santa type things throughout the year? Like, maybe a Halloween fic swap, or other holiday-themed swaps.

@ Gabriel's Angel Hina @ fairyfeller

I organized Secret Santa for this year, and I've organized a Halloween fic swap called Trick or Drabble for the past three years, so there are those things already on the site, but no one participates, and I believe it's because there's no site-wide promotion of those type of things as there are for things such as NaNo or the stuff that Mibba Magazine runs.

I just think it would be more helpful if people such as myself that are trying to start these community-wide activities had more support from the site as a whole, such as articles in the magazine, stickied threads, link on the homepage to boost promotion.

--

There are things like that in communities on livejournal all the time, but the only thing sort of like that on here is NaNo, which isn't even Mibba-specific. We have writing contests in the forum, but those are geared more towards competition between users instead of collaboration. I think it would be cool if we had more things that involved users trying to reach a common goal together and discussion between them, particularly if we had more ways that users could come together as a community instead of it being like "oh, here's this group of people that frequents the blogs," "here's these people that frequent the forums," "here's these people that write about x, y, or z."

I'd would like to use things like this to bring users together that wouldn't normally be exposed to one another because I feel like, on this site, users have a tendency to clique together with other users that write in the same fandoms, write about the same topics, or use the same aspects of the site, and it would be great to get people out of that bubble because there are lots of things that you can learn from people that are different from you.

I took it upon myself to start my own writing challenge, which can be found here if anyone is interested in participating

I'm also attempting to bring the concept of big bang challenges to Mibba with Mibba Big Bang