User blog:Gideoncrawle/ADMIN BLOG POST: New Story for the Front Page Sampler

About six weeks ago, Sprinklemist—our best known and most prolific writer—broke a year of silence and stunned the wiki by requesting that all of his stories and their supplemental materials be deleted. For various reasons, this hasn’t been done yet, although it’s likely to happen soon.

One of these stories, Total Drama Reality, is on our home page’s story sampler, so it needs to be replaced. Even if the story doesn’t get deleted for a while yet, we cannot in good conscience defy Sprink’s wishes by continuing to publicize his work indefinitely on the wiki’s most visible page.

You may nominate stories in the comments section below. (No “joke” nominations, please.) The story we select should meet the following criteria:


 * 1) It should be of good quality, because we’re using it to represent ourselves to the rest of the world. This should go without saying, but I’m saying it anyway.
 * 2) It should be finished, or close enough to completion and with sufficiently regular updates to give us reasonable assurance that it will be completed.
 * 3) It should be a competition story, like the story it will replace.
 * 4) It must be written by someone who isn’t already represented. Our policy for the home page sampler has always been, “Limit one story per author”. This includes collaborations with respect to the lead author only.

To keep the number of nominations manageable, and to help insure that only the best stories are nominated, please don’t nominate your own stories. You may nominate a collab that you’re involved with if you’re not the lead writer, provided it meets the other criteria. You may nominate as many stories as you like, subject to the restrictions above.

Finally, if the story chosen isn’t currently on the Classic Stories, Modern Classics or Current Favorites listings, it will be added to the appropriate listing.

Expansion Notice
Although the sampler has always listed eight stories, the home page’s layout allows room for expansion in pairs. If we get enough good nominations, we may expand the sampler from eight stories to ten. If we do, we will observe the following restrictions:


 * 1) The “one story per author” limit would remain in effect unless there is sufficient sentiment to relax it.
 * 2) Preference would be given to nominees that are notably different in some way from anything already on the sampler, including TD Reality’s replacement. We’re not looking for a collection of cookie cutter competition stories.
 * 3) A noncompetition story could be considered for one of the additional slots.

Let the Games begin.