Wacky Wants Your Suggestions!

The Important Stuff
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Howdy everybody!

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We want to see Wacky grow more and be a fun, active community for everyone! This is your opportunity to tell us what YOU would like to see from Wacky moving forward.

This could be feedback about the mod team (including myself) and how the forums are run, features you’d like to see, content you’d like to see, events…basically anything. Please share your thoughts, positive or negative! These forums are dear to us but we cannot exist without you, dear users, and we know that. YOU are what make us successful, so we want to stay in touch with what you want. Please note that our essential “no bullying, no bigotry” rules are non-negotiable, but we are willing to have productive conversations about the Code of Conduct too.

While we’re not actively trying to “compete” with other communities, we would like to see our growth be better and our users more engaged. We’re a very small team (and will be opening up applications for new moderators in the near future, so keep an eye out for that), but I am interested in possibly expanding beyond just moderators. If you think you have a skill that could be useful to the forum, please see this as your sign to let us know! If you like running events (on Wattpad or elsewhere), like to post on social media, want to design characters or content or book covers or graphic design and would be interested in doing so on Wacky, please let me know.

We struggle to maintain ongoing events because we don’t have many team members, but if you have an event in mind you’d like to run (contests etc), we’d love for you to partner with us if you’d be interested in doing that!

Have friends who are looking for “something more” than what’s out there in terms of community? Tell them to stop by and tell us what they’re looking for too. We want to draw in new people, and to do that, we want to know what the people are looking for.

I will do my best to field requests and implement what we can (time/resources permitting), but I’d like to see Wacky grow together through the rest of 2022 and beyond. As always, I appreciate all of you.

xoxo,
CJ :wackywriters:

Edited to add: if you see a suggestion already posted that you want too, be sure to give it a thumbs up!

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Wacky Writers Onion Link

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Also, there’s a similar forum called Shanni Writes, you may want to go there to get more people.

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Yeah I’ve seen Shannii’s forum! But since she’s in the same boat we are (self-hosted, relying on her users to keep her forum running) and has a similar subject matter basis (writing), out of respect for her and her platform I don’t want to go try to poach them lol. It’s just good manners! :joy: If her users find us on their own, great! Everyone’s welcome here.

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Is there a way to completely disable this sidebar in the settings?

Screenshot at Jun 12 15-21-56

If you exit out of it, it keeps coming back on the main menu when you refresh the page, and it’s kinda disrupting my experience with the forums.

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I’ll see if I can (it definitely should remain minimized, so I’ll see what’s up with that)! It’s experimental right now for navigational purposes and may not be a permanent fixture.

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Thank you so much!

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Refresh now, it should be minimized by default.

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Yes, thank you!

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Any chance we can make the top announcement banner closeable? On real-time chat you can’t see messages when you’re typing with the virtual keyboard (see screenshot 2).

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Ah, yeah that one’s a permanent one but I think I’m done running rebuilds so I can just turn it off. :slight_smile:

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Good to see you, Sock. Refresh, should be gone now.

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You too :slight_smile:

Always lurking around but I rarely find anything worth posting.

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Hopefully we’ll get more engaging content going on pretty soon :wink:

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I’ll start by saying what I like most about this forum. I like that everyone here is their own person with their own unique views on things. I lose interest in forums where everyone is pressured to think the same way. Especially as a writer, I want to see characters, even if they’re flawed in some way (I’ll include myself in this). I just appreciate that we’re allowed to talk about whatever as long as we keep it civil.

As for suggestions, I have a weird one! How about a “Word of the Week”?

This is how I’m picturing it… Every week a new word is selected. This should be something relatively obscure or unused. Then, anytime someone says the word in a post, it gets highlighted in fancy colors or something. Kind of like the secret word thing in Peewee’s Playhouse. Just imagine if everyone found creative ways to use the word “somniferous” in every other post. I know it’s a dumb idea but there it is. :sweat_smile:

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This! I agree with this. Though I haven’t seen it as much on here, this place feels much more welcoming for all views. On wattpad I felt very outcasted because as an adult I don’t fall under a lot of the ideologies that younger people usually have. (Statistically younger people lean more liberal and the older you get the more conservative you become) Anyways, I never felt ‘safe’ having a different opinion even though I never really expressed my opinion. (I defiantly wasn’t allowed to because I was an ambassador) But there were multiple forums hating on people who feel the same way I do, but if there was one open hating on the way everyone else felt you’d be attacked for it. I don’t see that same thing happening here.

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This makes me so happy to hear, because that’s what we want this forum to be. A place for discussion. I know drama is fun to watch, but it makes for a toxic environment. :sweat_smile:

Okay I totally love this?!! Let me see what I can do. Idk if I can do fancy word highlighting, but I will sure try!! That sounds so fun haha.

No such thing as dumb ideas! This is the kind of thing we want! This would be super fun lol.

And this is why we push so hard for civil discussion because we don’t want anyone to feel unsafe here. Everyone should be able to hang out and have a nice time without feeling like they’ll get attacked.

And if you did, we would take care of it! We have pretty strict rules for moderation which doesn’t always make us real popular, but again, drama makes for a toxic environment and having seen how that’s worked out in a few other forums (and having been the target of cyber-bullying myself in my younger days) we just don’t tolerate that here. There are plenty of cesspools of toxicity on the internet…we don’t want to be another one.

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Can there be a prehistoric theme for the forums?

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I can look into it, sure!

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I actually have zero suggestions :stuck_out_tongue: I’m quite happy with this site. But I thought, well, maybe there could be something especially if you’re thinking of attracting more people. So, I went to almost all my writing Facebook groups I’m a part of and asked what they look for in a writing forum.

I haven’t had any responses yet, but I think it’s too soon to say there’s nothing from them.

I did, however, find out something rather interesting. In my Figment-refugees type Facebook group, talk of benefiting from lengthy reviews and being unable to get that on Wattpad compared to Figment came up. Idk if that can be a thing for a forum. Idk how you would do it. Maybe somehow set up a voluntary feedback system? Not an entire chapter, but maybe a couple paragraphs? It has to be an exchange system. And maybe it refreshes every couple weeks? I really don’t know if it can work here.

I know there’s already the read-for-reads, but not everyone is on Wattpad and it might be hard to do read-for-reads sometimes. Some people might shy away from read-for-reads, too. I don’t really use the feature right now, but having some opportunity to get feedback and give feedback more easily seems to be something people value to have on a writing community website.

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