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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.