I've taken note of a few things with these boards recently. I'm going to start with the Showcase.
The showcase board is supposed to bring attention to new stories. I did ask about one issue with this on another thread (creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:478429), but here's the thing. I've looked at a lot of the story posts there - and it's basically a group of "1 message, 1 message, 1 message, 2 messages, 1 message). I'm already fully aware that the number of messages on the posts don't mean that it's not serving its purpose, so I took a look at some of the stories posted there, including my own.
The Dress and Cat Mask - 1 comment
In Torment in Hell - 2 comments
The Jump - 7 comments
Spiderland - 12 comments
Now, just to make sure I covered all of the bases, I looked at the history of each page, as attention tends to be brought more to pages that are constantly edited. Spiderland and The Jump both have medium amounts of edits done to them. Meanwhile, In Torment in Hell has 8 edits (counting its creation) altogether. The Dress and Cat Mask has 5. Note that In Torment in Hell has broadcasted probably everywhere that the author could possibly broadcast it from.
In other words, I'm pointing to the fact that the writer's showcase doesn't really serve its full and complete purpose. There seems to be a lack of attention to it, and thus the stories on it. There was supposed to be a template (the one we're supposed to use) making the showcase appear on the main page, but I've looked. It's been months and this hasn't really been looked at or addressed. The template is not on the page. What happened with this template? On an additional note, how can we bring more attention to the Showcase in and of itself, and by extension to the showcase authors?
And now we get to the Workshop. It's got an attention problem as well, but slightly different. The attention given seems erratic. Some posts don't get answered, others get one to two messages, and others get twelve or thirteen, or even twenty. The reason this seems like cause for concern is because we're looking for quality work and helping people improve their writing. Some stories not getting a single review doesn't help the authors of those stories, and it most certainly doesn't help us get new quality content or bring good authors to the site. My only theory as to why some posts don't get answered while others get an answer from almost everybody at once is because a lot of those stories are pretty long, which is understandable to some extent. It can take time to fully review a twenty page story. No one can do that in five minutes.
But then there are a few I've noticed that don't get much attention but aren't that long. So, the question lies here: What can we do to spread attention over the Workshop's stories more evenly so everyone can get at least one or two answers, preferably more than that?
The reason I'm asking these kind of questions and bringing this up is because in the end, these two things are meant to help new and experienced authors. With attention problems getting the way, they don't. So I've decided to bring this up and see what can be done about the current attention issues and address them.
