Disclaimer

Warning - Some posts may cause choking, spitting of beverage and /or a severe giggle fit. This advice brought to you by regular reader Louisa.

Sunday 27 February 2011

Pestering Plans Backfire

A couple of days ago I posted a note on my Facebook page alerting members of HPANA (the Harry Potter site that I moderate for) that I would be doing a mass delete of inactive story threads from the boards next week. The (somewhat sneaky) plan was to remind people that they have unfinished stories that need either completing, or saying good bye to. I was hoping that at least a few members would decide that completing a story was far better than having it deleted.

Anyway, a fair number of threads had people swiftly post a comment to them - making them technically 'active', thus ineligible for deletion - but most of these comments came from just a handful of readers who wanted to keep their favourite stories on the boards. Thankfully, there has also been a couple of authors posting too, with tentative plans to continue their stories.

So the plan worked in a way, though not as well as I would have liked. Unfortunately, it also backfired on me, and now the Guilty Star is hovering slightly too close for comfort. I had some friends post some pestering comments on three of my own threads. One of these threads contains short stories, and these types of threads are always safe as I believe they should always be available to read. However, I also have two longer length stories that I never got around to finishing, one of them substantially long. So I have spent the better part of today re-reading the last third of one of my own stories. It has been eighteen months since I last updated it (this is where that Guilty Star comes into play), and I seriously had no idea what was going on with it. I don't see me completing the two stories any time soon, but I owe it to myself to finish the story that I have, over the years, put a lot of work into. Not to mention that I also owe it to a bunch of readers who have stuck with me since 2005 -!- and have always returned to read whenever I posted one of my infrequent updates.

So the tale of Remus Lupin, boy-wolf, shy teen, and perhaps Best-Of-The-Marauders, shall soon be continued.

4 comments:

  1. Can't wait to read it. As I no longer Facebook I didn't see the notice but did get two follows from Cursed. Wish there was a way to liven up HPANA, it's rather slow lately.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, one of the reasons that I rarely 'clean' the forum is that it is only half the size it used to be. If I removed all of the inactive threads there'd only be three or four pages tops. Plus I hate delete story threads anyway... so much work goes into them, you know? I always hope we'll get more members popping by to read, which is another reason why I keep the fanfics longer than the standard three to six months.

    ReplyDelete
  3. *shifty* So you didn't WANT me to go save all those stories? *blinks* But in my defense, I pushed Mari and Krystal into action *nods* And I have an update done that is waiting in my typing pile, so that's something...

    ReplyDelete
  4. True... plus my pestering prompted me to finishing copying over my Wand Wars, so that one is done, and I seem to have convinced myself to finish *both* of my longer fics too... *is joining the shifty gang*

    ReplyDelete