Feedback Post!

[peppermint_shamrock]

Hello everyone!

It's been about a year since starting this community, and I'd like to keep going with it. My current plan is to just run the same events again, on the same schedule, i.e. Album Challenge in May, Bingo in September, and Duet Challenge in January, but I'd like to hear your thoughts! Did you enjoy these events? Do you have suggestions for other potential events? Please let me know!

I don't have an account that can run polls, so please answer in the comments:

Do you want to keep going with the Album Challenge event, or try something new?
Do you want to keep going with the Bingo Challenge event, or try something new?
Do you want to keep going with the Duet Challenge event, or try something new?
Do you want more events during the year, less, or keep it the same?
Do you have any suggestions for new or alternative events?
Do you have any suggestions or improvements for the existing events, or the community as a whole?

Any other feedback is welcome, too! Thank you!

Comments

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Oh, wow. Lotta tough questions, there. Golly; I wish I wasn't the first one to see and comment. Uh, let's see...

I'd been wondering what the next challenge was going to be, actually. The challenges you've had for us, so far, have certainly been great, so no complaints, there. Having them too frequently, though, might eventually start to run the risk of becoming monotonous.

Several years ago, I made up for myself a bunch of prompt tables for a "community" that I never got around to opening up. Each table consisted of ten songs from certain decades of the previous century. 1900-1909, et cetera, all the way up to 1990-1999. So, for example, the first table would have a song from 1900, followed by a song from 1901, 1902, and on and on. And each table was like that, but with each successive decade. Maybe you could make up similar tables, but members could fill in those years, themselves.

Another idea could be each member taking their birth year, and going with something that was on the charts during each month of that year. Not necessarily number ones on Billboard, but any placement on any such list. (Unless they're sensitive about their ages, lol; I'm aware of how indiscrete this particular idea has the ability to be. In that case, it could be a year that's significant to the member for some other reason; the year of a wedding, or a child's birth, or what have you.)

Or perhaps members can name a singer or a band, and X number of albums, you could choose the album(s) by said artist(s), and then use a random number generator to choose a song off of the album. (I realize that that's not much to get three months of writing from, but I'm sure there are ways it could be tweaked to fit the community.)

Maybe something involving novelty songs? Sorry; I don't have any specifics in mind for this particular thought.

I don't know how good these ideas are, but I thought I'd try and put in my two cents.💙

[peppermint_shamrock]

Those are some good suggestions, thank you! Though I'm hesitant to do anything where I pick a specific song/album/artist for anyone; I'd rather leave the choice up to the participants since everyone has different musical tastes. But maybe for that last one I could do something where each participant signs up with a list of albums or songs and the random number is the same for everyone that week, and would correspond to whatever song they have in that "slot". Kinda like what no_true_pair does. I like the year-based suggestions as well.

I think it's close enough to May that I'll just go with the Album Challenge again, and probably Bingo is fresh enough to keep doing, but I think I might try something different for January. I'll definitely keep these in mind, thank you!

[pebbleinalake]

I participated in the Album Challenge this past year and loved it so much! Didn't get it done before the deadline (actually I'm still working on the last two fills because I'm ridiculously slow at writing 😅) but it's easily been one of my favorite fic challenges in a long while. Would love to see it return again this year.

I can't really speak on the other events since I got too busy during that time to participate.

As for the number of events, I think what you're doing with three per year is good. It allows them to be spaced out nicely and prevents overwhelm for anyone who is participating in more than one fic challenge community.

[peppermint_shamrock]

Thanks! I think I will do the Album Challenge again this year, it's getting a little close to plan anything else at this point.

[cornerofmadness]

I'm good with redoing the challenges we had, they were fun and there is always so much music out there to choose from. I think the event lengths are pretty good as is.

cyberiad_queen had some good suggestions. Another could be to tackle it by musical genre (leaving that wide open since not everyone is going to listen as diversely as others) or tackle the artist or songs by the alphabet or have numbers in the song titles used etc.

[peppermint_shamrock]

Thank you! I'm thinking I will do at least the Album Challenge and Bingo again, might change up the January event next time, though.

Oh, I do like that alphabet idea, I'll have to keep that one in mind! Genre is definitely a tricky one (people seem to argue a lot over whether a song "counts" as a particular genre or not), but I could think about adding those as bingo options, since people can exclude those if they want.

[cornerofmadness]

sounds good to me

yeah genre can definitely be tricky. The alphabet is much less likely to be an issue. Use if you want, toss if you don't.,