I think DL being a Wattpad-flavored discord is what turns me off about it.
Itās like all the worst things about WP wrapped up in a neat package you have to accept to join.
Iām sure there are good things about it too (or it wouldnāt have as many members), but I was welcomed by too many red flags to see the good.
Idk if this has been talked about, but what about having, in the share your stories, a section that doesnāt update weekly? This section is writing tools. So, itās not just going to be resource books on Wattpad but any blogs someone might have written as well, or published books on writing.
Weāre all at different levels of writing and itāll be helpful if a forum for writing has a directory of resources.
So, while we can always ask for advice, maybe some people donāt always want to ask people but find it out for themselves? And sometimes, maybe none of us know the answer, so the person has to go search for information but doesnāt know where to look?
I seem to like the word ādirectoryā today 
Used it three times already.
I like that idea.
To add to it, what if we utilized tags? Not sure what the capabilities or limitations of discourse are but being able to click a tag and see other topics like that would be cool.
What Iām thinking about is the repetition that Iāve seen over the years.
People ask the same questions all the time and after a while, I donāt feel like repeating myself so I might not answer where in the past I have. Maybe if we could help writers find the prior answers, that would help?
Another thing to consider is SEO. In my own blog, I have a SEO plugin that gives me suggestions and one of the things it offers is a FAQ block to help create a clear question and answer. These blocks are what show up as suggestions in Google search.
For example, hereās a popular question: How long should my chapter be? The first few Google results are FAQ blocks:
This could help drive traffic.
Another New thing to consider is to have a difference between A Discussion vs A Question post.
One forum Iām on has it that questions will remain open until the OP chooses the best answer. Other non-chosen answers can be marked as Helpful. And people who respond have stats: how many of the answers you gave got a Helpful mark and how many were chosen as Best. This little tally could help motivate more responses and overall, an engaged community.
Thatās a good idea. And sometimes I might have a question that I know someone else has asked because I saw it a month ago but maybe I canāt find it now. (I said might and maybe because it hasnāt happened yet, but itās not zero!).
If there could be an FAQā¦ but how do you decide what is frequent if there are variations of the same question? Youād have to comb through questions to find the common ones.
Maybe there are some admin features to help with that 
Omg. I love this idea.
Flashback. Years ago, i was on poetry.com (I think it was a different site than what it is now) and they did a poetry book. You submitted your poem and they added it to the anthology. And then the authors purchased them. And sure, itās not the same as publishing and there was never a mention of royalties so you gave up your rights, but I still have that book and it feels really cool.
We could do the same but actually do it properly, proper rights and the possibility of royalties if that ever happened.
Iām all for it.
I agree. When discords get large, itās very overwhelming. On a forum, it feels a lot more relaxed. You can take your time to discuss things as slow or fast as you want.
The Writersā Dungeon. 
I like the idea of pointing out how much this isnāt the discord.
Meaningful conversations. Thatās our niche.
Yeah! It looks like such a fun and cool thing to do, Iāve just never integrated myself in any forums to feel like I deserve to enter them :') Still, itās a publishing credit, a fun activity, and sometimes a way to make some pocketchange. Could be awesome!
Sooo many cool contributions! cracks knuckles
Yup, and also I like having a place where I can just dump my ramblings somewhere they can potentially get attention, without pressuring anyone into a conversation 
Itās not exactly new, we just havenāt used it before because we had the Wispstagram going on. We decided to try using this one now because itās an easier, more recognizable username.
We happen to agree And anyway, Dreamland is quite different, aside from it being a Discord community.
We have taken into consideration shaking up the structure a bit, to diversify and divert from Wattpad nostalgia a bit, but itās not exactly an immediate need. But itās on the agenda and if you have any suggestions, weād love to hear them 
We have one, and itās called #all-writing:writing-resources 
This is where general writing advice goes, as opposed to specific story-based questions. Topics in that category donāt autoclose and donāt get hidden. But these are all user-based contributions, we havenāt yet gotten around to an official, Wacky-vetted directory. Though it did pop up on the agenda today
We also have tags, official category-specific ones as well, and Iām pretty sure CJ had compiled them somewhere neat, but I canāt find the page with Discourseās new (I know itās not exactly new but I havenāt been around too often last year) menu layout. Will have to look into making that accessible and potentially expanding on it.
I like that idea, and Iām pretty sure CJ implemented the āchoose answerā feature in some categories, but I dunno if it can be set up to also autoclose threads. Because otherwise weād have to go in and manually close, or people would have to request closure, and nobody really goes to all that trouble.
The thing with all of these existing features is making people aware of them and then convincing them to use them. Weāre pretty laidback here in general, and also donāt have the manpower to closely monitor everything people do. Some things will eventually get out of hand.
That sounds like something that could go into #all-writing:writing-resources and Iāve tried to move non-specific writing question threads over there, but, again, we probably need to work on awareness + a more efficient tagging system.
That is something thatās come up in the past and honestly weāve got pretty good taste in books, if I do say so myself So many of the (Wattpad) stories we featured have gone on to be successful to some degree in the online writing world. We could probably work something out if we put our minds to it, once weāre thriving instead of just surviving
That seems to be the consensus, and also my personal reason why I joined this forum 3 years ago instead of random Discord servers I canāt keep up, but I feel Iām just āoldā. Attention spans are just getting shorter and shorter. Also, Iāve seen Discord has a āforum channelā option now, so maybe we could test drive that Though I did accidentally create one such channel and didnāt understand what to do with it and immediately deleted it lol
If these are the same ones you choose when you create a topic then:
Some of it is in the presentation though. How obvious is it that these features exist?
The forum I bring up isnāt discourse but maybe we can use some of these features as inspiration if possible?
For example:
I clicked on a category and now I can sort the topics by popular or unanswered.
I clicked on a topic and when I get to the answer, itās right in my face that I can mark it helpful.
No one needs to explain to me what the thumbs up means.
If I was the OP Iād also see a button to choose that question.
If I start my own topic, the option to turn it into a question or a discussion is immediately available.
Make the options easy for people to find and theyāll use them. If it has to come with a user manual, then itās always going to be poorly utilized.
Iāve used the forum threads.
Good thing - conversation doesnāt get lost in the constantly moving regular channels.
Bad thing - thereās less engagement than in regular channels since people have to go out of their way to see what you posted. They wonāt accidentally see it like they would in the regular channel.
So I think that format could work for sharing resources, etc. Itās not a good substitute for discourse.
Iāll be writing a lovely long post for the next few minutes, so if you see me typing, thatās why.
Hoooray!!!
I want to expand personal threads in some way and Iām currently exploring options to do that. Itās very much like a āTwitter Feedā in that you can just post whatever you want and Iād like to try and make a more social aspect (that isnāt direct replies in the thread itself). I just donāt know how Iām going to implement that yet. Discourse very much wants to be āanti-social mediaā at least in the traditional way, so trying to expand it to be more āsocial-orientedā is proving to be a challenge.
Iām planning to eventually put out a request for authors/editors/agents to do some scheduled AMAs. I donāt know if itāll get much traction, but I have a few ties in the writing community so thatās an angle Iām currently working.
Yes, this was a fun perk of being featured, it just takes time to create those banners each month. If I can figure out how to automate the creation a little faster, we can reintroduce this.
I still donāt understand what ābook clubsā are. I was only on the Wattpad forums for a few months before they closed, and like, obviously I know what traditional book clubs are (pick a book, read it, discuss), but I would really like to explore something more like this (groups of like-minded writers having discussion about books). We just need some people who can help run them. I think we had a ābook clubā section waaayyyyy back in the beginning but no one used them so we nuked them.
Donāt worry about this. Iām in the Dreamland discord also and, while itās impressive for their purposes, itās not the type of vibe weāre striving for here.
We have places for (almost) all of these things, we just need to figure out how to get people engaged in them. I think specific genres is what weāre missing.
This is actually a prominent Discourse feature, but we havenāt seen an interest in using tags before. We can definitely expand this.
I have functionality in place to allow this: it was in beta when I last enabled it and made things break, but itās been long enough I can reintegrate it.
Or a bot, like Wisp, who could offer suggestions. 
One of our mods is currently working on a bot that will be more stable and not crash as much as Wisp does, so we might be able to explore this option. The other thing is, Discourse automatically says āthere are other topics like this 
here are you sure you want to post this thread?ā and I think people ignore it. We had a discussion about our own FAQ page a few days ago (I was thinking of revamping it) and the reality is, people want an answer NOW , they donāt want to have to backread to find the answer. I think a bot or auto-suggestion of some kind would be the most logical answer.
I technically have a company registered that could do this, but the problem becomes royalties. If we have 30 authors in a e-book that costs 2.99 (or even a print book that costs $10), the royalties become negligible and it become cost-prohibitive for us to attempt something like it. And I hate asking for people to ādonateā their work without being paid. Iāve asked for that before and it made me feel awful because I strongly believe people should be paid for their work.
āLong-formā conversations. Weāre writers. Weāre verbose. I see this complaint frequently on Twitter: writers donāt want to go to Instagram or Tiktok which are more āvisual mediaā based, they want to be somewhere they can write.
Discourse-based issues the unpopular sidebar was the answer to that, but thereās another sidebar option we can implement which is specifically tags or replies. Iām working on making that an option but any changes to the current layout seem to be unpopular.
I will look into this as well, I think thereās an option for āhelpful/unhelpfulā icons, but Iāll have to double-check to be sure.
I think I can implement this.
Agreed. User Interface design is SO important and I donāt feel that Discourse always has a great understanding of whatās the most user-friendly. Like with all these other things, Iām working on trying to improve this within the limitations of Discourseās software.
I have a new feature called ārecent repliesā which shows the most recent replies across all forum threads. Iām wondering if this might help drive engagement if peopleās curiosity is piqued by whateverās happening in another thread.
ALL THAT TO SAY:
There are a lot of features we could implement and/or expand upon that I have options for or that Iām actively looking into. It all really comes down to how much the users use those features. For example, we have the chat feature and have had it enabled for months. Itās Discord inside the Discourse forum for fast-moving conversation. And yet, we donāt have many people who use it. 
That leads me to believe itās not necessarily the Discord layout/platform/features that drive its popularity in terms of usage, itās something else, which may very well be justā¦how well-known (or not well-known) certain communities are.
Dreamland was mentioned several times, and they are successful in a lot of ways because they are aggressive with their marketing/user onboarding practices. If we can figure out a way to harness a similar methodology, we can probably gain more traction. Iām going to review our sign-up practices and see if thereās an easy āone-clickā way to sign up that we havenāt implemented.
Okay, thatās all for now lol.
As to the unpopular sidebar. I think the problem with is that it might get clunky on the screen/too much going on. If it was possible to collapse it, that would help.
Once youāre on Discord, joining a new server is super easy. You donāt have to create a new account or get another app - all communities are in one place. Perhaps account creation is something to look into. What options do we have now? Can people sign up with Google?
Or maybe livening up the Discord Wacky is worth looking into? If we ensured itās alive and there are conversations going on, we could try to attract writers to check that out if they already have Discord and it could be a gateway into the Wacky site.
It was. Wanna know how?
Click the hamburger menu. 
Remember what I said about Discourseās UI decisions? Not one of their better ones.
I donāt think we have that option set up, but Iām going to look into it because itās easy.
We need a much bigger team if we want to implement everyoneās suggestions about how/where we can increase engagement elsewhere.
I think it would be hard to invigorate the Discord and end up doing something more effective/more desirable/ than other Discord servers. I love Discord as a platform, but I think it would be exceedingly difficult to do something unique there without a lot of work. The Dreamland comparison comes up often, but from what Iāve heard from my friends in that server itās an environment they enjoy but not one that fits our approach hereāand people have also said that the composition of that server has changed over time in a direction that might be even less conducive to long-form discussion.
The fact of the matter is that unless youāre promising everyone who joins Wacky Writers a thousand comments on their story and an unicorn, you arenāt going to please everyone, and that includes people who would in practice be a great fit for us but donāt care to join. Iāve been talking with my off-Wattpad writing buddies about āwhat would make you want to join a writing forum,ā buddies who are generally aware of my Wattpad adventures, and the biggest motivation they cite is having consistent writing exchanges like we do among themselves. They donāt care as much for craft discussions (or perhaps they didnāt like the threads Iāve shown them here, which tend to be threads Iāve startedāhopefully Iām not the one to blame there): they want to see how other people implement principles in practice and want varied takes on their own writing. The discussions they like having are āOK now that weāve all read Jimās first five chapters letās have a round table and discuss our feelings,ā which is also a very high-intensity hardcore way of going about things I donāt think most people here care for. I think they would have a lot to contribute here, but I also donāt think theyāre entirely wrong in saying that they can already get all the writing-related banter they want themselves with the added benefit of actionable feedback.
Book clubs mean something different on Wattpad and some people get really offended whenever I suggest that the traditional approach has merit or that there are ever better ways of doing critique than rotating through ten books over the span of eight years, but thatās Wattpad, and I agree with a lot of Kamiccolaās points that some people and some groups poison the well when it comes to how writing groups should operate. My intuition is that people on Wattpad are too invested in their own writing to want to join book clubs where they donāt directly benefit, and the sorts of people who like traditional book clubs are already in traditional book clubs and arenāt looking for more.
Having done both Wattpad book clubs and more typical exchanges on Wattpad, as well as critique exchanges with my off-Wattpad buddies, Wattpad book clubs tend to be very slow and ineffective at gaining feedback on peopleās whole books: Iād much rather have one person read all my book and be able to comment in a more nuanced way than fifty people telling me they loved my first chapter but thought it needed more dialogue. When rotating through so many books itās hard to keep things straight, while with private partnerships itās easier to spend a day blitzing through each otherās books and then give feedback. Inline comments are partially to blame: theyāre excellent, but are draining to write, and the net effect of all of this is that book club assignments feel more like homework than something people do to immerse themselves in writing.
My point with all of this is that there are a lot of traditional approaches to building communities on Wattpad that donāt mesh with our niche here. Perhaps theyāre more effective: thereās probably a reason why Dreamland has what, 5000 members, and we have far fewer than that. But something is needed thatās not just another place to talk about writing, if we want to expand the Discord. It could be some sort of review/book club service, it could be more specific craft-based share-outs, but the sad fact of the matter is that wholesome vibes alone arenāt enough to keep us afloat anymore.
So the way the ones Iām in work are (on Wattpad) like a read for read: every week/fortnight/month (whatever) you are paired with someone and you read 2-5 (whatever the book club chooses) in that time frame and comment.
Then in most clubs, you rotate, but most cases you can choose to stick with that person.
People dont like me bringing up DL here, but Iām in 4 of their clubs so Iām gonna use them as my example:
Dreamland Exchange is a rotation of 1 week, and you read 4 chapters of someone elseās book, comment intensely and focus on critique for editing. (this is more the traditional wattpad book club experience, but most book clubs do 1-2 chapters where this is intensive)
Dreamland Hunt is every month, but the minimum you read is 6 chapters per month and more if you want a chance to be book of the month. But with this club, you can read whatever book you want from all the members, and at any level (reaction comments or editing comments). You can also pair up with others and agree to read each others book for more points (thereās a point system).
Dreamland Rush is twice per week, but it focuses on one (or two) people being featured that update and you just comment reaction (or light editing like "oh thereās a stray comma), but itās more about comment spam.
They also have one book club where the owner of DL searches out new and undiscovered books around Wattpad to feature them and get more reads for those without as many as others. Itās rather wholesome.
Book clubs are what you make it, what Iāve found is the more ārelaxedā groups (not in DL, now Iām talking general) are people who just want attention on their book (not saying this is bad) but the more āintenseā clubs with like weekly rotations and more comment guidelines feature writers who are looking for more editing/critique.
For example, thereās one by Team of Dreams also on Wattpad who I used to be a part of. They do a bi-weekly book club in groups where people are more relaxed, but then they also do a Wattys book club every Watty season which is more intensive, and you do see the difference.
Yeah, like some people below say, itās about people getting attention on their work, but once you find people, it becomes more about the books.
When I started book clubbing, it was more for my own work, but now Iām in for both reading and writing. I found some pairs on each book club Iām in and stick with those and I just love reading them per week/month etc. I also get comments out of it, and some are now my āfansā so to speak so itās a win-win all round.
ETA: Iād also like to say that through book clubs on WP, Iāve actually learnt a lot about editing, and without the book clubs I was in, I would not have edited my book to be Watty Shortlisted. So people who think itās ineffective havenāt had the pleasure of decent partners. 
Itās totally effective if you get the right people in the clubs, a good and organised club going. There are plenty out there on Wattpad.
