The weekly update

[piksa.livejournal.com]

It's me again. This time I'm even relatively on time, it's still Sunday! *g*

We had a good week. Once more we had some new writers joining our ranks, some people returning but unfortunately we didn't survive without losses this week either.

First of all a warm welcome to the community to banyangirl1832 and taintedintent!

Secondly we are happy to see blood_monster, jitkajaylor, sevendeadlyfun and strickens_girl back. Welcome back guys!

Unfortunately we lost the following authors this week. blue_icy_rose who got the Calliope award, dawnofme who got the Clio award and twisted_reach who got the Clio award as well. Hope to see you back soon!

Comments

[catw00man.livejournal.com]

Hi mods.

I had a question/comment and since I didn't see a question/comment post I figured I'd just go to the last mod post So here I am. :)

Anyway, this was a question I've had for awhile but after this week I didn't really feel I could sit on it any longer. This has to do with the deadline for getting fics in. I know sometimes it's difficult to get things done and sometimes we have computers that can go wonky or we are out of town or whatever but to be honest...I thought that was part of the challenge. I guess my question is, what exactly is the "grace period?" Is it a few minutes, hours? I know we have lots of time zones here so I do not expect the mods to be watching for the exact second or anything and that we should be able to go on the honor method. It's just when I see something 10 hours over the deadline that I have to ask, what exactly is the deadline? Is it really fair to just lie and change the date when it's that late?

Anyway, I just wanted to know. I know I've been out spoken at times and that's just because I do feel this is one of the harder writing comms out there and that to actually hold the title "Goddess" is and honor and something to be proud of. Thanks for listening!

~Cat

[piksa.livejournal.com]

You asked a very good question. I usually go by the time stamps as like you said we aren't able to be there watching the community all the time to see if things are posted in time. The problem here of course is that the time stamps can be changed. I haven't found a case where a grace period would have been needed but in my opinion we don't really have one. People have a week to post their story and that should be enough.

These things are also quite hard to prove. If we don't happen to check the community around the time the deadline is it's quite impossible to know when something was really posted. I've talked with my fellow mods and we do agree that cheating won't be tolerated. Ideas how to develop our system are welcome. We will discuss this further among the mods and decide what action we are going to take. I'm sorry that I'm not able to give you more clear answers at this point.

[zippitgood.livejournal.com]

Not sure how viable a solution this would be, but there could be a post along the lines of "comment here once your fic is posted" because the timestamp on comments can't be changed. Though then that brings up the issue of different time zones so I guess people would need to post their difference from the GMT and yeah.... :-\

It's a lot of extra work I know. I'd just hate to have the quality of the comm go down just because some aren't honest enough to report if they didn't make the deadline or not.

Just a suggestion. I do love this place and want to see it continue.

[catw00man.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for addressing this because yeah, it does bother me for as hard as we all work for someone to take advantage of it. I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything but see, I don't read LJ on site. I use an RSS reader that downloads my comms and friends every hour so I know within an hour when something is posted, and since it's on my computer it can't be changed. That's why I even noticed it in this case because the entry was dated today at 10:23 am and I saw it pop up this morning. I'm central time so there is no way that post was in anyway made on time.

I don't know if it's helpful or not but here is a screen shot I've just taken where you can see when the entry was posted.

Screen Shot (http://www.cryptoffic.com/images/ttmlatepost.jpg)

You can see the previous mod post and other entries. I normally see these until 2-3am my time which makes sense and I never think twice. But 10:23...well...it caught my eye. Anyway, I know how difficult this is to police and honestly, in a perfect world, you shouldn't have to. I'm not sure what the best solution is but an RSS reader like this might work. You could set it up for TTM and have it update every hour, half hour or less if you wanted to. Once it's downloaded it's downloaded.

Anyway thanks for your attention to this and I'm really not trying to be a jerk. This just seemed a bit...excessive to me. Thanks again and we'll be looking forward to hear what you decide.