Your opinions, please?

[sprat.livejournal.com]

So the challenge is over for another year, and it went pretty well. We ended up with more stories than participants, anyway -- so many, in fact, that I still haven't finished reading them all -- and I again managed to avoid exploding any servers. \o/

Still, there were a few areas where things could be changed for the better, I think. When I gather up my own notes and the suggestions and comments other people have made, it seems things fall into these categories:

* People wish they could reply to comments right on the same page, a la LJ.

* Stories are hard to edit once they're uploaded to the archive.

* There's no way for vidders and artists to participate in the challenge.

* We had quite a few late postings this year.

So here's one way I thought we could address those concerns:

Movable Type supports Open ID. That means people can comment with their LJ or Vox logins if they want to, and I found a plugin that adds support for threaded comments, too. For next year's challenge (supposing there's interest enough to have the challenge again), everybody could get their own ID for a Movable Type blog on my server. They'd have until the deadline to post something in draft form to this blog; after the deadline, I wouldn't allow any new posts and would assign pinch-hitters to any no-shows.

HOWEVER, it'd be pretty easy for people to make edits and changes to their stories once posted, so during that post-deadline week, there'd still be time to get beta, fix typos, etc, before I publish the stories publicly for reading. This is similar to the way Yuletide runs things, and I think it's fairer -- and also less nerve-wracking for me. *g*

Movable Type would allow for the posting of vids and art, so we could open the challenge up for this kind of participation, too. I'm thinking we could allow people to specify in each initial request if they want a vid or art or a story, or let people keep it open if they haven't got a particular preference. (You'd still only get matched based on ONE of your requests, though.)

The downside to using Movable Type is that it doesn't support "advanced" searching the way the Automated Archive does. You can still search based on keywords and author and whatever, but you can't set specific limiters. We can make a tag system, though, so people could sort for reading that way. I set up a dummy blog over here if you want to see how it might look. The posting interface is very similar to LJ's one, so I don't anticipate that it'd be difficult to figure out.

So what do you guys think?

[Poll #1123453]

Feel free to add other suggestions and comments in the comments, too.