The Summer Slam **OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT** PHASE 1

[Humilatron]

I mean the only prize is bragging rights and I suppose a story if you want one, but if I end up winning my prize will be not having to write a story

[Humilatron]

Maybe I’ll make a badge

[Revengedpirate]

Some people are cutting it really close lol. It’ll be interesting to see what’ll happen in the next phase though. The initial word count for phase 2 I had set I ended up reducing because I realized how long it would actually allow people to be, and I do want to make sure people don’t end up going into hibernation before this tournament ends let’s just say the first word count I had would be 10 pages equivalent to which I know we all like long stories, but that’s just a bit much. I think I’m settling for 2500 words which is about 5 pages. Not too long, not too short.

did you not state we have till april 10th? which is still two months away?

[*Lady Lucia*]

My two cents--I would either use the voting system on here, or pony up for an account on SurveyMonkey or an equivalent site.

For those that missed it a year or two ago, I had to do multiple rounds of voting thanks to a few different issues. SurveyMonkey has gotten a little greedy, unfortunately; they used to allow simple surveys to anyone for free, but now once you exceed 30-40 votes, you have to pay to see the rest of the results. Bailing on my formerly go-to platform, I swapped over to Google Forms. Unlike SurveyMonkey, it's easy to vote again and again and again on Google. Where previous contests had 40-80 votes over the course of a two week voting window, I found myself with 80+ votes in a single DAY on Google. Somebody suggested it could have been bots, but I still suspect it was a human dead set on having a prompt included that they really wanted to read about.

Obviously, there will always be ways to cheat if someone really wants to, but the following two options will at least make it more of a chore to do so: Requiring a gmail account for Google Forms, as that limits people to just one vote per account; Or, voting on here, which also will require making an account for some.

Personally, I'd lean towards keeping things on here. Only because once guests suck it up and finally make an account, they'll be able to thank writers for posts and potentially join the community via comments, discussions, and such. That being said, I used to be content as a reader/lurker, so I totally understand the hesitation.

[Debbifan]

did you not state we have till april 10th? which is still two months away?

I took the reference about cutting it close to be to the 800 word count ?

[SDS]

Big well done to everyone's first posts. Especially love the only girl at boarding school one had some great ideas for continuing that one if I get it .

[Humilatron]

In terms of cutting it close, I was referring to the word count. Literally 2-4 words (exe) away from hitting the limit lol

[Humilatron]

I think what I’ll do for voting is use strawpoll and then link each of the polls. It has good security and options that I like. Plus it won’t involve spamming the board with polls because ideally I want the voting to happen all under one post so that’s why I don’t want to use the site’s version of voting. You won’t need an account to vote and it also has VPN protection. The only reason I was considering Forms was because you can have multiple questions and thus I wouldn’t have to create a link for each bracket.

TLDR I’ve determine the voting method I will use now.

[Executionus]

In terms of cutting it close, I was referring to the word count. Literally 2-4 words (exe) away from hitting the limit lol

Yeah I had to cut nearly all descriptions, including describing the girls uniform in any detail or giving any clues about what Sarah looks like aside from "long hair" and "skirt". This just leaves that up to the next writer I guess. I also had another misogynistic metaphor involving Lot's wife, aka Salty McPillar, but I never had the room for it and I probably had enough of that already with the Eve lines.

Look, I'm the type of guy who back in school always used to come dangerously close to the word limit the teachers would give us on our reports. One of my teachers made certain I knew that I was the only student she'd ever had across years of teaching who always came close to the maximum size instead of the minimum size like all of the normal kids.

[edithdick]

Hi all. I’m new to this site and generally new to writing fiction. I enjoy this genre and remember reading the Karen Walker saga several years ago. Since then I have read a number of similar stories and always thought of contributing my own some way. I’m glad to have found this board.

There seems to be a lot of good talent on site. I look forward to seeing what is done with my entry.

Can someone help me understand how the brackets work? I get that we will be assigned someone else’s story to continue. What happens next?