This Prompt Meme May Self-Destruct

[kalloway]

I think most people utilizing AO3's challenge features are more familiar with the exchange tool than the prompt meme function.

This is possibly because the prompt meme function is kind of broken. It is certainly less-developed than its sibling.

I made This Prompt Meme May Self-Destruct as a testing ground in case anyone else would like to play around with prompt meme functionality.

All fandoms, relationships, characters, etc. are welcome. However, because there's no attached tagset, the meme is limited by AO3.

Be as creative as you want to work around that. ^_^

And, if you'd like, I'd like your thoughts on the whole thing. I'm not a coder; I can't fix anything. I'm just curious what other people think and maybe if someone sees compiled data, they might take suggestions into account.

(Note: Anything created for the prompt meme is in no danger of deletion even if the prompt meme vanishes in a puff of 0's and 1's as dawn comes on June 1.)

Comments

[melannen]

For me, the main killer of the AO3 prompt meme is that there's no way to comment on prompts - I get why they don't do that - I suggested it strongly back when it was first coded, and got a good list of reason why it wasn't worth it - but for me a huge part of DW/LJ prompt memes is that the possibility of getting comments on my prompts, or even long discussion threads about them. That's a lot more likely than getting a fill, in most memes, and can be just as fun! (It also means that if you're thinking of filling, you can test the waters first and see if your idea will be actually welcome.)

Other problems include the lack of true anonymity, which means lbr it's never going to support a healthy kinkmeme (even moreso now than when it was first coded, I think), Also the general high amount of buy-in that is needed even just to post a prompt - I can't just breeze by and drop off a stupid idea, I have to "sign up" and fill out a whole form, and then iirc if I want to add more prompts later I have to edit my original signup, and really it's not worth it for my stupid idea, is it really. (I was going to drop off an MDZS one in yours just to see, but it requires canonical tags only, and I am way too lazy to go look up the MDZS canonicals just to drop off a test prompt! There are ways around this for a mod, iirc, but they have their own downsides and require a lot more mod work.) It's also really not intuitive for prompt-posting at all.if you haven't

And is there a way to turn off claiming? Every prompt collection I've played with includes claiming, and not all prompt collections want or need it, for several different reasons.

It might be a really cool way to organize unfilled prompts from a meme held on lj/dw, having a mod enter everything would preserve anonymity, except there's no way, iirc, for users to mark prompts as interesting except by claiming them, and I also don't think there's any way to link prompts to fills except by claiming them and filling them on AO3, both of which are major downsides to its usefulness for that. (If I were a real coder I might be tempted to pull out just the prompt collection code and try to turn it into a stand-alone archive for indexing DW kinkmemes, except at that point it's probably easier to start from scratch.)

I've considered trying to make a private prompt collection just for my own bunnies that I wouldn't mind other people writing too, but see above about the downsides, and a Google Sheets works for that too.

It *is* pretty useful for a prompt-claiming fest, where there's a list of semi-anon prompts for participants and then each participant claims a prompt and fills it without it actually being an exchange. Those kind of fests were really popular on LJ back before AO3 existed, and I think it's probably the main thing they had in mind when coding it. But by the time it went up, I almost never saw that kind of fest anymore - it seems like that part of fest culture was subsumed by exchanges (which is probably partly AO3's fault for making them a whole lot easier!) and partly by kinkmemes (which don't work on AO3) and, I think, partly by purity culture, since a couple of the last ones I saw on LJ had huge problems with people attacking "problematic" prompts before claiming even started.


...apparently I still have lots of Thoughts on this huh.

[pauraque]

I always did wonder why the prompt-claiming function on AO3 seemed to go totally unused, so this is very informative!

The only place I see prompt-claiming fests anymore is in Harry Potter fandom. I think HP culture is quirky due to having such a long history on journal-based platforms, so some things are still done "the old way" just out of inertia (not to mention some fests have been running annually for so long that they significantly predate AO3). Nowadays some prompt-claiming HP fests that run on Tumblr use Airtable or Google Forms or something instead of a journal post for the claims.

[melannen]

Yeah, if you want the claims to be anon until posting, AO3 isn't even all that good for that, either. The ones I remember from LJ didn't have anon claims, but they also increasingly had people being hassled for picking "bad" prompts, so, you know. Good to know HP is still keeping up the traditions! I think all the multifandom ones I used to do died even before AO3.

(I've actually been thinking it might be fun to have a prompt-based fest where the claims remained anonymous forever - the stories were revealed, but you were never allowed to say which prompt/prompter you were writing for, people had to guess. It would be awful to run, though, I think.)

[impala_chick]

Yeah, I miss anon kink memes! Too bad there's no way to do that on AO3.

[melannen]

There are still some going on DW! They aren't dead yet!

[impala_chick]

Oh, yay! I'll have to keep an eye out!

[kalloway]

I appreciate your thoughts! I had first started playing around with the idea because I do have an old LJ comm with old unfilled prompts, but AO3 only allows 50 per person and that's... nowhere near enough.

I also find it frustrating that either the prompt meme is locked to AO3's canonicals (or lack thereof) or to a user-generated tagset which requires constant mod attention. (If I tinker with this again, I intend to go that route, but honestly both routes suck.)

[stefanyeah]

I'm being led being led to dicover functions of AO3 I've never heard about before. :O My, what a sheltered life I had so long.

But how does such a prompt meme work?

[beatrice_otter]

A prompt meme (often called a kink meme) is a place where people leave prompts for other people to write if it strikes their fancy. Most prompts are never filled, most fills are short, there tends to be a lot of discussion.

Here's an example of one on DW: https://age-of-sail.dreamwidth.org/31366.html

[stefanyeah]

Oooh, right. I remember we had one of those for Museslash back on LJ for a while. We weren't really disccussing much there, though. Long long time ago.


Now just to figure out how that works on AO3.

[beatrice_otter]

It doesn't work well on AO3

[stefanyeah]

Yeah, I gathered that from the comments I saw so far. But I'm also rather curious if I discover new things. Need to play with them and get happily frustated along the way. :D

[beatrice_otter]

My experience with the Prompt Meme function on AO3 is that it is SO DAMN UNINTUITIVE TO USE. It always takes me a bit to find where the existing prompts are and/or where to make my own.

The links to "here are the prompts already made" and "here is where you go to make new prompts" should be FRONT AND CENTER AT THE TOP OF EVERY PAGE, not buried in the links list on the side.

[kalloway]

I'm still trying to figure out why any Collection has a Dashboard page when there's literally nothing of use on it. The profile page is at least informative if nothing else.

Also, I agree and it was even worse setting it up despite really only needing the basics. I know there have been extensive tutorials written for exchanges, but I've never seen much about prompt memes (likely because of their broken-ness, alas.)

[impala_chick]

The merthur_glompfest used this for the fest this year. Non-writers posted their prompts, and then at a designated time they were open for claiming. I was glad there was a browsing period, because there wasn't an easy way to sort through the prompts that I knew about, so I just had to read each one. Although all the prompts were the same ship, so maybe that's why. I liked how claims worked and I liked that when I posted my claim, the whole prompt showed up in the notes box.

[kalloway]

The only Sort options seem to be Fandom and Date, so I can see that not working so well for single-fandom or single-pairing memes.

[impala_chick]

Oh, I didn't even see those sort options! But yeah, I'd like to be able to sort by rating or characters.

[rosefox]

I didn't even know there was a prompt meme tool! Fascinating.

I tried to put in non-canonicals and got "That prompt would make your overall sign-up invalid, sorry." and a return to the main screen—no opportunity to edit my prompt or specific explanation of what the problem was! Amazingly poor UEX there.

[melannen]

Huh, when I put in non-canonicals it returned me to my sign-up and gave me the option to edit it. I wonder what the difference was. Were they non-canonical fandoms maybe? My bad ones were all pairings.

[rosefox]

I nominated Original Work and used non-canonical characters, pairings, and tags. For proper science I'd have to try non-canonicals in each field in turn.

EDIT: Non-canonical characters gets "These character tags in your request are not canonical and cannot be used in this challenge". Non-canonical relationships gets "These relationship tags in your request are not canonical and cannot be used in this challenge". Non-canonical additional tags gets the "Edit Prompt" screen refreshed with no error message but no changes saved.

[kalloway]

Oh no! I'll have to test that and see what happens. That's terrible design.

ETA: And I just saw your reply to melannen, wow. That'll be something to keep in mind and perhaps send in a ticket about. (At last to give better errors!)

[rosefox]

I was sort of trying to break things but I didn't expect them to break that thoroughly!

[kalloway]

Wow, I just managed to replicate the 'ate everything' error and ouch, I can't imagine typing out a multi-paragraph prompt or something and having it vanish because of a typo. Wow.

[rosefox]

Oh no, that would be heartbreaking!

I'm guessing there's been a vicious cycle of "no one uses this so no one reports bugs so no one fixes bugs so it's buggy as hell so no one uses this"...

[kalloway]

That's probably it. No incentive to fix an unused feature so it stays unusable.

I did get it to not totally wipe a "bad" prompt by putting it in on the Edit page and then adding a second, "good" prompt beneath it. That just gave me a whole different set of errors but it at least had the tags/text still intact.

[rosefox]

A friend sent me a screencap of someone saying "[merry brandybuck voice] don't think they know about qa testing, pip" and it's flashing before my eyes right now.

[lea_hazel]

Honestly, my desire for prompt writing and/or claiming mainly revolves around saying "nobody's ever written this pairing and I think it might be fun, anyone wanna give it a whirl?" And the AO3 format doesn't really support that, does it? Prompts on Tumblr and DW anon prompt memes still work okay for me, although it depends a lot on the culture of the specific fandom. I don't know what causes certain tropes or plots to take off in certain fandoms, but it's affected my fandom participation probably more than anything.

[kalloway]

There are two options with an AO3 prompt meme-

1. Use AO3's canonicals, which is what I did for this. Probably super-useful for a big fandom, single-pairing event, etc.

2. Use a tagset, which requires users to nominate the tags they want to use, the mod needs to approve them and constantly mind the tagset/approvals, and the once the tag is approved, user needs to select it to leave the prompt. Time consuming and no immediate gratification for anyone.

So basically they can both be good or both bad depending.