Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-29848568-20170917085808/@comment-24101790-20170917140803

Looking objectively at it, I feel like there's only three real ways this goes down.

We remove the filters and deal with incoming stories. Here's all the stories that violate the filters we've set up this past week and here's the general quality of those stories. That's not to say all stories will be that flawed, but that is the gist of most stories that get caught up in the abuse filter. Just saying that it's going to put a lot more work on the admins (a number of which you'll note are not active at all) and the fact is that saying I'll just delete them and handle the extra work is a bit improbable seeing that I was out Sept. 5th-10th celebrating the birth of my nephew and likely will be spending more time away to go out and see him in person while trying to have a real life. To add on extra work to an already beleaguered group (with three semi-active admins) seems like it's going to cause more problems than fix as well as likely not changing anything. Just because the appeal is gone, doesn't mean that incoming spinoff stories will be judged any less stringently (see the guide I wrote on it below) as they're being compared to the original, judged for quality, and need to be its own entity as well as other critiques.

The second is that we leave the filters up and keep the Spinoff Appeal. While this will discourage some I really don't see much of a flaw in the system as it is (given that I'm the one who approved the two latest stories). Authors can take the time to work, revise, and re-write their story (some have even posted in the writer's workshop to get feedback. The two that were accepted had been posted on other sites (DeviantArt and the Spinpasta Wiki iirc) and had chance for review/revision. A suggestion I made when I wrote a guide on this topic. If you'll look back at the abuse log I shared from this past week, you'll see who often users try to post their story (sometime a dozen times in the span of an hour) without really bothering to figure out what's going on and that's what I imagine will happen without a filter in place. A majority of those people use kept banging up against it without making any improvements to their story or trying to figure out why it's blocked. (One user who posts over Reddit stories fixed the issue in the title and posted their story) You can say it's more restrictive to users, but the truth is, given the tendency for spinoffs to be formulaic I really don't think a little extra work is a bad thing. If you're willing to ask the admins to put in the work, why not the users as well? Sure a large number get turned down, so do stories on the deletion appeal. The simple fact is, if someone unwilling to work on improving their own story once feedback has been given, how exactly does that result in quality content that deserves to be on the site?

The third is just an outright ban and removal of the spinoff appeal. A final note: When we were talking about removing the Spinoff Appeal, we weren't saying that we were opening up the site to all stories, just that most admins were tired of writing in-depth reviews for stories of varying quality. It was a decision I'm glad we didn't take personally as I still rather have 1-2 good stories get approved every year than outright block them all. Much like the call to ban all poetry which was made a few years back, I think it's overly restrictive.

Really, I think the system that we have now, while not the most streamlined, does allow for the best outcome. It may not allow for easy posting, but that's not really a bad thing in my eyes. The stories of that genre ended up that way because people were re-hashing plots and recycling ideas. It got to be so much of a problem that the blacklist was created. Looking at the stories that get caught up in the filter, I can't say a whole lot has really changed.