It’s been a long and not particularly productive couple of weeks, mostly due and birthday season at my house and various illnesses. In my spare moments, I’ve been trying to write a bit each day, and I’ve been thinking about various issues surrounding publication. I think that’ll be another post, though!

I’ve also paid a few visits to one of the JAFF boards, 50 Miles of Good Road, where there have been some interesting discussions about possibilities for different kinds of sites in the JAFF community. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for the last year or two, not coming to any good conclusions but wondering about different options. When AI became independent again, we discussed various ways for AI authors to interact with their readers, and these blogs are the beginnings of that. There’s still exploration to be done in this format, like posting stories in blog form with comments as reply, similar to the way some writers post stories on Facebook. So AI is meandering off in its own direction, but I’ve been intrigued by the discussions.

Follow up:

There are some new ideas (or old ideas redux) out there, like an automatic story archive, or about adding comment boards/guestbooks for individual sites, or having a ‘clearing house’ site where readers could find a central list of updates, a ‘subscription’ board where there would be fees for membership, and the eternal debate about whether the JAFF community has too many or too few boards. A lot of it gets drawn into the inevitable discussion of the “shoulds” – for example, writers should welcome constructive criticism in their comments (ha!), readers shouldn’t try to direct stories, sites should never be down, etc. Problem is, I’m one of those people who thinks that any statement with “should” in it is most likely false and probably bad for mental health. It all comes down to the same thing – JAFF readers and writers are all on a spectrum, and no place on the spectrum is better or worse than anyplace else. You can prefer your on-line community big or small, focused on RL meetings or fully anonymous, touchy-feely or argumentative. You can like sites where all stories have to be beta’ed, where there are or aren’t ‘mature’ stories, where the admins intervene at the drop of the hat or never at all, and it’s all good. There’s never going to be only one answer, though the JAFF Index comes as close as anything can.

But I’m curious – are there other ideas out there for what people would like to see in the JAFF community?