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

[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.