Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Q
Roger, I can definitely see why you'd want this, particularly given that you write poems for children where magazines are ultra-strict about public posting prior to publication. Julie has also said that she'd post more here if there were somewhere private to post it.
I wonder what the consequences would be, though, of adding such a forum. Anyone who wants to publish incurs some slight risk (however small) by posting publicly. So, if there were a choice between posting in a public forum or a private forum, how many people would choose to post publicly?
So if we had Met and Dark Met, say, I think Met would likely go pretty quiet, pretty quickly.
In which case, maybe making all the critical forums private is a way forward. The argument I've seen made against this option is that then we wouldn't attract as many new members, as potential new members wouldn't be able to look around before joining.
That said, maybe if all our critical forums were private, we'd actually end up attracting more people. I do get the sense that many people are put off of by the idea of posting publicly.
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I think Matt's onto a few things here.
I do avoid posting in Met because I don't like the idea of disqualification. This is despite the risk of disqualification's having been repeatedly debunked. People can go on debunking it; so far as I'm concerned it stays bunked. If TDE became a "Deep Drills" of the Metrical board, I'd feel much more positive about posting in it.
However, I think the point about new members being attracted because they see poems being posted is correct. I think this because I only discovered the Sphere while searching for information on the Spectator competition back when I started entering it. The search engine brought me to Drills and Amusements and I was amazed. A few weeks later, new Spectator threads became undiscoverable to non-members, so I might well have missed Eratosphere had the timings been different. If an increasing or numerically stable membership is considered desirable, having less stuff on show or searchable probably won't help. On the other hand, maybe it would.