Writing log site in planning stages--needs input

[Deleted]

EDIT: Please see the bottom of this post for new developments on this project!

So Breakingchains had the awesome idea of a writing-log app to help writers get motivated about their writing and aid in eradicating procrastination. I loved the idea so much I brought it up with a programmer friend of mine. After some discussion, he mentioned that it might work better as a website, so that's the direction we're leaning in.

Anyway, we decided to ask you fine writers here at the NTWF what kinds of features you'd like to see in a website that provides incentives for writing, kind of like a writing personal trainer.

Here's what we have brainstormed so far (including breakingchains's original ideas) :

SPOILER: Click to show

- On-site, copy-and-paste-into-text-box word count checker (doable; one of the core components of the site)
- Achievement system based primarily on word count (doable; what kinds of achievements would everyone want to see in addition to the standard "write x amount of words"?)
- Random matchup with another user online for a timed word war (possible?)
- Personal space for outlines, notes, etc. (Would this be necessary? How many people would use this as opposed to writing notes on paper or in a word processor document?)
- Set your own quotas (daily, weekly, etc.) and the site will inform you when you've met them (and possibly alert you to remind you to fulfill them--optional) (doable)
- Personal stats and records, showing data like the total number of words you've written (i.e. input into the site), the most words you've ever written in a day, what your peak writing days/hours are (doable)
- Graph showing word count (cumulative and daily) over time (potentially in the form of tables with cell coloring to simulate a graph)

EDIT: My friend and I have revived this idea with a new spin: Word Warrior, the writing RPG where a word count checker allows you to fight monsters, gain experience and gold, advance on your quest, and collect shiny things to dress up your virtual avatar! The pen is truly mightier than the sword!

The biggest loophole with this idea right now is the fact that people could potentially enter random gibberish just to get a high word count. Here are some solutions we’ve thought of, along with their pros and cons:

SPOILER: Click to show

• Honor-based system where no input text is kept in the database
  • Some abuse would be inevitable
  • NaNoWriMo has the same loophole and plenty of people still use it correctly
  • Would be the least complex system for users and site developers
• A public/private system where public entries would gain double the rewards, or gain publicly-given praise rewards from other members as they verify that the text entry is legitimate 
  • Not all users may want to share what they’re writing for various reasons (plagiarism, privacy, etc.)
  • Opens up a venue for trolls to maliciously mark legitimate writing as invalid
• Time and length constraints could be put in place to limit spam flooding
  • Can only input text once every 15 minutes
  • Daily word cap
    1. Word cap could increase as player level increases
• Submitted passages could get sent to another random user for judgement; community would be self-policing
  • Users may not want to read random material from random other users
  • Would create delayed gratification, which can be an interest-killer in an RPG
    1. Taking the effort to write should be delay enough
    2. Users probably won’t want to attack a monster and then wait an indeterminate period of time to see the outcome and reap a reward
    3. Optimally, each battle (except for boss battles) should last the length of a moderate writing session, say one or two hours, with plenty of time to get multiple attacks in (taking into consideration the above-mentioned flooding countermeasures) 
  • Input text could be assumed correct until verified fraudulent
    1. Rewards would be instant, but taken away later if the “attack” doesn’t pass judgement
    2. Would create logistics problems—what if someone levels up, buys stuff with gold, etc. with the rewards generated from an attack that then gets judged invalid?
  • Only snippets are taken, say 200 words, for a quick “this isn’t gibberish” look-over
  • Some users may not want to read potentially objectionable content
    1. Entries could be sorted by rating and genre so people won’t read what they don’t like
  • Entire process may be too cumbersome for users and developers alike

We'd love to hear your input! Please note that this website is in the planning stages and we can't promise that all of these features will be available, or to what capacity, in the finished product.

[Ajax]

Anything related to a graph function showing word count (cumulative and daily) over time would be cool

[Deleted]

Mar 7, 2014 15:44:41 GMT -5 Ajax said:

Anything related to a graph function showing word count (cumulative and daily) over time would be cool

That's an awesome idea! Noted!

[Breakingchains]

Well this progressed fast! xD;

Ideas:
- Achievements: Completing projects, revising projects, submitting projects for publication (or kindle publishing, etc.) Basically it would be neat if it encourages not just writing new material, but following through on what you've written already.
- The ability to add details about your projects--create a new novel/short story/anthology/play, etc., title it, pick a genre and write a little bit about it. Cast-of-characters section, if you want. Choose to share the page with others or make it private, set deadlines, and check goals off as you complete them.
- How about support for collaborative projects, where multiple people who are part of a project can update it's status and their individual wordcounts toward it?
- Some sort of interactive representation of your progress, maybe, like some sort of graphical element? Like, off the top of my head, when you write another 1% of your goal on a project, it adds a brick to your picture and in the end it's a castle, or something along those lines? Goofy example, but visible results can be really motivating for people, along the same lines as using a ticker or meter for wordcounts during nano.

This is neat that you're running with this, I hope it gets off the ground! x3;

[M is for Morphine]

achievements:
Consecutive days/weeks written (Like, "Wrote every day for 7 days in a row!")
Total Days/weeks/months where writing happened? (A month's worth of productive days!")
Winning word wars, and also just instigating word wars (seems like a good way to encourage people?)
Achievements for beta reading/critiquing other users?

Some sort of interactive representation of your progress, maybe, like some sort of graphical element? Like, off the top of my head, when you write another 1% of your goal on a project, it adds a brick to your picture and in the end it's a castle, or something along those lines?

I love this.

[Deleted]

Breakingchains - Well, it was an awesome idea.

These ideas are awesome! Thanks so much, guys! I really hope this project comes to fruition (and you can bet I'll be working for it to be).

[Deleted]

We're bringing this project back and taking it in a bit of a different direction! Please tell us what you think!

[Sabre]

If there could be a thing that gave you the choice of how many options you could pick, that would be awesome. Because I know there would be some writers who wouldn't want that 'smaller wordcount at the beginning' thing, nor would some of them like to send out their writing to a random person (that privacy concern. I wouldn't want to for fear that somebody would steal my writing)

I really do like the idea of this, making a daily wordcount app seem like an adventure.

[Deleted]

I personally feel like the whole peer review system would be way too much of a hassle for both other users and site staff, but my friend is stuck on the idea and I told him I would at least throw it out there to see what other writers might think. I think an honor system would be fine--after all, it takes at least a bit of effort to insert enough spaces into random gibberish to make a word counter recognize it as more than one word. xD

Those who spam the system with gibberish just to level up... would probably be better off playing the plethora of much less tedious RPGs out there. xD The point is to keep writers motivated during the very long and laborious process of putting down words, and provide a fun and inventive way to track one's word count. The RPG is supposed to be nothing more than the reward for getting your writing done. I want people to treat it like a personal, non-competitive experience, so we wouldn't have any leaderboards or anything.

And I hear you about the plagarism thing--that's a legitimate concern, and I certainly wouldn't want my unfinished/unpublished work going out to random people to see (and potentially lift) either. That's one of the main wrenches in the peer review system, and a large part of what makes the honor system so attractive to me.

I'm also concerned about the potential for malicious users to get their kicks out of rejecting every snippet they review, just to take other people's legitimately-earned rewards away from them. And in order to fight that, we'd have to have some form of higher moderation for each individual judgement--which would require either extra site staff to work/volunteer as moderators, or for users to do moderation duty as well as review duty. Not to mention extra time for each individual judgement to fully pass through the system, creating a logistics nightmare any way you dice it. And, well, I just want the site to be a place where you can log in and just start adventuring with your word count to spur yourself to get that novel written, not have to spend time reviewing and moderating other people's work.

The entire process creates more problems than it solves, IMO. In the honor system, if someone wants to waste four hours of their day doing nothing but typing gibberish in order to earn virtual rewards on a website, they may need to rethink their life--but their actions are not actually harming anyone (except, perhaps, for those forced to listen to their bragging). In the peer review system, honest writers' work may be exposed to potential plagarists and trolls, unfairly putting them at risk and/or punishing them for simply trying to motivate themselves in their passion (and for some, their livelihood). I know which set of pros and cons I prefer, but my friend isn't quite convinced yet.

[Breakingchains]

OH HEY THIS EXISTS. I like the direction you're taking this in, turning it into an RPG sounds really cool.

I'm not so much worried about the plagiarism thing, just because last I heard, that almost never happens in the world of fiction anyway (more of a nonfiction/academic problem really.) I'd be more concerned about... pretty much everything else you listed: malicious rejections, spambots, random pieces of writing going to random people, etc.. Many, if not most users would want to write privately--heck, my first drafts don't get shown to anybody--and having differences in rewards/etc. would leave them in the lurch. If you get a good volume of users then settling disputes on whether something was a legitimate piece of writing or not would be a nightmare without a large moderation staff. Plus, it raises the question of what, exactly, constitutes a legitimate submission. Some of my first drafts border on word salad in places, whereas even a bot can construct gramatically-correct sentences. Can you tell the difference between an artsy-fartsy prose poem and the ramblings of a hard drive working off random numbers? With some people's poetry I kinda can't. XDDDD

Bottom line, as long as it's not player-versus-player I think an honors system is really not only the wisest approach but possible the only doable approach.

[Deleted]

Good point. xD I'm going to make my friend read this thread next time he's online.

I'm super excited about the prospect of turning it into an RPG--it's one of those things that I wish existed, but it doesn't, and I think I've got the resources to make it happen. I'll keep this thread updated with our progress.

[Breakingchains]

Looking forward to it ^^ Do keep us posted!

Actually, I'd like to throw another suggestion on the pile: how about some small functionality for those who just want to punch their stats in manually? Not with in-game rewards but just to have it logged and listed. If you're updating from your phone or whatever you might not have the option to copy and paste your whole document right then, but you might still want to log that you wrote 1,000 words that morning.

[Sabre]

I do think that it'd be great to have the option to be able to word war against another person (maybe without simply a small digital badge as a reward? or not since people will still flub those too unless there's a wordcount verifying thing.) because there are times where I'm all, "I wanna word war!" but nobody's online.

[Deleted]

Excellent suggestions! I'll see what we can do.

[Layla "Nimbus" Karimi]

...This sounds amazing. I'm all for it

I, uh, don't really have any input at the moment other than that I agree that the honors system seems to be the best way to go, but I'll let you know if I think of something.