Currently, the Things I'm making and creating subforum has been flooded with SWCs. As of the time i'm posting this 13 out of the 22 threads on the front page of TIMAC are SWCs.
If you don't know what “SWC” is, it means scratch writing camp, and to quote the creator “Scratch Writing Camp (also known as SWC) is a triannual writing camp, running during the months of March, July and November.”
As its currently July, its expected for lots of SWC's to be posted during this time, however I believe they're being posted in the wrong subforum, here are my reasons I don't want them to be posted in TIMAC.

Reason one:
TIMAC is for stuff outside of scratch. Firstly its placed under the label “Interests beyond scratch”, and to quote paddle2see “The Making and Creating forum is a place to discuss things you are creating or exploring outside of Scratch.”
SWC's have scratch in the name, so therefor it is not an outside of scratch activity. (also paddle didn't mention writing being allowed in the guidelines but I frequently see people post short stories they're working on and thats fine with me)

Reason two:
They don't create discussion. Very often they don't get above 10 posts, so its just people posting their writing and then that's it. A studio or a project could be used instead, just like how Scratch Team don't allow threads for people (you can just use a studio).

Anyways those are my reasons I don't think SWC's should be posted in TIMAC. For an alternative I suggest having a new SWC subforum, dedicated thread, or just using studios and projects. I understand that they're long and a forum is an ideal place to post it, but not in TIMAC

scrooge100 wrote:

Currently, the Things I'm making and creating subforum has been flooded with SWCs. As of the time i'm posting this 13 out of the 22 threads on the front page of TIMAC are SWCs.

That's true.

scrooge100 wrote:

For an alternative I suggest having a new SWC subforum, dedicated thread, or just using studios and projects. I understand that they're long and a forum is an ideal place to post it, but not in TIMAC

It won't be equal to add a SWC subforum (there are other things like SRC, SAC, etc.), but maybe they can expand the “Interest beyond Scratch” to something like “Writings”, “Crafts”, etc.

-MyNewAccount- wrote:

scrooge100 wrote:

Currently, the Things I'm making and creating subforum has been flooded with SWCs. As of the time i'm posting this 13 out of the 22 threads on the front page of TIMAC are SWCs.

That's true.

scrooge100 wrote:

For an alternative I suggest having a new SWC subforum, dedicated thread, or just using studios and projects. I understand that they're long and a forum is an ideal place to post it, but not in TIMAC

It won't be equal to add a SWC subforum (there are other things like SRC, SAC, etc.), but maybe they can expand the “Interest beyond Scratch” to something like “Writings”, “Crafts”, etc.

if they want to have an “SWC Megathread for month of blank” in one subforum thats fine with me, heck it can even be here, but the individual writings are just spammy and don't create discussion and go against the TIMAC rules

I mean, the individual writings can be annoying.

But if they post all their writing in one masterpost it's not too bad. Plus, a lot of people ask for critique, encouraging discussion.

Hi, I'm a cohost of SWC ^^

I believe we have, in the past, asked what the correct forum is, and been told TIMAC, so currently we recommend posting in TIMAC (we do, however, encourage that campers create one thread for all their writing rather than a thread per piece of writing.)

I understand that we are effectively flooding the front page - and this is why we try to encourage posting writing all in one thread instead of creating a new thread each time. Try to remember that we have a lot of members that have never - or barely been on the forums before. They may not know the proper forum etiquette or even that topics can have more than one post.

I don't follow your logic. Is the writing somehow “special” because it's written for SWC, and being “special” makes it not fit in TIMAC? It's just writing - which is an interest outside of scratch. Furthermore, writing is something you create - and TIMAC is “Things I'm Making and Creating”.

You say that they don't promote discussion - but in lots of such threads, read through them and you'll find that not only do they contain writing but they contain posts from people who have read the writing, critique, ideas. I acknowledge that this is the exception and not the rule, but honestly - I think that's good enough.

A new SWC subforum - I think previous posts have agreed that this is unlikely to happen.
A dedicated SWC megathread - This has crossed my mind before. It hasn't happened yet by reason of being confusing for campers who aren't used to the forums. I also think this is counter intuitive - a megathread means that many posts will get lost in it and so writers will be less likely to actually see the discussion of their pieces, and others will be less likely to actually read work posted there.
Studios and Projects - To be frank, these are not formats that suit writing. Project notes and credits have character limits and inside projects means writers will have to spend time copy pasting a slide at a time into a text element (or make something that scrolls - which is outside the coding ability of many of them). Studio descriptions have a similar limit and well, copy-pasting a long story into comments is simply not viable with the lack of line breaks and short character limit.

If not in TIMAC, where else? Suggest somewhere else and we'll happily start recommending it instead - but I really believe TIMAC is the best place for such posts.

whiteandblackcat wrote:

Hi, I'm a cohost of SWC ^^

I believe we have, in the past, asked what the correct forum is, and been told TIMAC, so currently we recommend posting in TIMAC (we do, however, encourage that campers create one thread for all their writing rather than a thread per piece of writing.)

I understand that we are effectively flooding the front page - and this is why we try to encourage posting writing all in one thread instead of creating a new thread each time. Try to remember that we have a lot of members that have never - or barely been on the forums before. They may not know the proper forum etiquette or even that topics can have more than one post.

I don't follow your logic. Is the writing somehow “special” because it's written for SWC, and being “special” makes it not fit in TIMAC? It's just writing - which is an interest outside of scratch. Furthermore, writing is something you create - and TIMAC is “Things I'm Making and Creating”.

You say that they don't promote discussion - but in lots of such threads, read through them and you'll find that not only do they contain writing but they contain posts from people who have read the writing, critique, ideas. I acknowledge that this is the exception and not the rule, but honestly - I think that's good enough.

A new SWC subforum - I think previous posts have agreed that this is unlikely to happen.
A dedicated SWC megathread - This has crossed my mind before. It hasn't happened yet by reason of being confusing for campers who aren't used to the forums. I also think this is counter intuitive - a megathread means that many posts will get lost in it and so writers will be less likely to actually see the discussion of their pieces, and others will be less likely to actually read work posted there.
Studios and Projects - To be frank, these are not formats that suit writing. Project notes and credits have character limits and inside projects means writers will have to spend time copy pasting a slide at a time into a text element (or make something that scrolls - which is outside the coding ability of many of them). Studio descriptions have a similar limit and well, copy-pasting a long story into comments is simply not viable with the lack of line breaks and short character limit.

If not in TIMAC, where else? Suggest somewhere else and we'll happily start recommending it instead - but I really believe TIMAC is the best place for such posts.

sup, thanks for responding, just to let you know in no way am i trying to attack SWC or something lol

anyways I agree with you on the studio/project thing, I was just saying that in the way that scratch team has told people to use it before in terms of people making stuff like “scrooge100 topic” or something.
I say that SWC shouldn't be posted in TIMAC because it's technically still something that's inside of scratch, its am (unofficial) scratch run thing by scratchers, not some short story some dude is making in his free time.
i went back and looked at a few of the SWC threads, and for most of the part the replies are just people replying to their own posts and infinitely bumping things. yes there is some discussion but the ratio of people responding to their own threads vs people being like “hey u should do this” is like 3:1 or something
i still think that the best course of action is to make a megathread, idk if you guys have a studio or anything but just let people know to post it in that thread. while bigger threads are pretty daunting to post in/read i have posted in many threads in tirap before, and the discussion flows along fine there, maybe it would be different for writing idk

hi I'm dotu, a regular camper. absolutely no support. here's my response, mostly rephrasing Kat's points into a much more straightforward form.

its am (unofficial) scratch run thing by scratchers, not some short story some dude is making in his free time.

but it is some short story some person is making in their free time. the difference is that it's also for a little fun camp that encourages people to write. as said by kat: it's just writing.

i went back and looked at a few of the SWC threads, and for most of the part the replies are just people replying to their own posts and infinitely bumping things. yes there is some discussion but the ratio of people responding to their own threads vs people being like “hey u should do this” is like 3:1 or something

so what? (incoming otherstuffexists argument don't say I didn't warn you) there's the occasional beepbox.co post outside of the beepbox.co forum, or the occasional topic made for an obscure meme someone found on youtube. maybe even an art dump, if some are feeling feisty. hell, even test posts.

again, what makes swc writing any different from any other writing/art dump?

i still think that the best course of action is to make a megathread…

swc does have a studio btw.
as kat stated, mega threads are counterintuitive and can leave new forumers confused and writing can easily get lost in the mess. with timac, sometimes writing is pulled under the sea of threads but it's easier to navigate and requires less scrolling. (i hate scrolling btw it is my worst enemy)

Hello! One of the leaders of SWC here. I completely understand your point - and trust me, most people at SWC would really prefer to use something else like blankslates - but other sites where we can post our writing has been banned. So, in order to follow those community guidelines that you say our topics are breaking, we've had to turn to forums.

The comment limit certainly hinders any hope of sharing writing through comments, and you'll find for most campers, the same goes for studio descriptions - it's just not practical for us to create multiple studios to share one story. To further Kat's point about posting them inside projects, yes a lot of our campers might not be able to code that, but also, have you ever tried to put a paragraph into a costume? It's all just one line of text that breaks the project. You have to painstakingly create your own line breaks - again, not a viable option especially if we are trying to promote sharing writing.

I would heavily disagree that SWC is “technically something inside of scratch.” While yes, the camp portion of it is run by scratchers, the writing portion isn't on Scratch. This is the best forum suited for posting writing - because writing isn't included in the “coding” aspect of scratch. Many of our campers do this in their free time. Not only that, we have campers who continue to use the forum they made for a season of SWC to post their writing throughout the year. So, should it be fine if they are posting their writing there throughout the year except for the months that SWC run? There really isn't a good way to stop only “SWC” posts from being created. At that point, you should just get rid of writing from the TIMAC thread which defeats the purpose of it. Where else can we share it?

On your point that most threads don't have discussions on them, I would argue that is just the sad cause of sharing writing in general. For reference, before I joined SWC, I used to post my own writing here. I would say for about half or so of the stories I posted, no one commented - and out of the half that had responses, it was because I asked someone in a comment to view it. Feedback for writing is just not readily given in general, but that doesn't mean it should be banned from TIMAC.

On the topic of a mega-thread, which is the currently proposed suggestion - do you really know how many campers we have? We have 800 - a number that has doubled in just the past year. Can you imagine the chaos that having 800+ people commenting on one thread, sharing pages long worth of writing. Everyone's writing would be buried forever. Not only that, but it touches on one of your points about none of the threads being a discussion. With a mega-thread, what little discussion you claim for us to have would be essentially halted. It wouldn't even be close to a discussion at that point. It would just be campers spamming writing, not being able to find their own posts, etc. It would be madness for the leaders, hosts, and campers alike.

Nevertheless, we have been considering solutions such as each cabin having its own mega-thread. The only problem with that is we currently have 15 or so cabins so we would still end up taking a good portion of the front page of TIMAC. There is no good solution currently that accommodates both the scratchers in SWC and those who use this topic outside of it. Until we are asked to move, or until a better solution is proposed, we'll be staying here.

my personal suggestion would just be to join swc :') the more the merrier! backup campers are still open

scrooge100 wrote:

new SWC subforum

Sorry for necrobump, but that part is a duplicate of this: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/507961

bump because they be comin' back

Queer_Royalty wrote:

bump because they be comin' back

yep, that's because the next session of swc is starting soon! we're making a lot of effort to keep people from creating too many forums though. every cabin is required to have this in their description: “if you need to post writing in the forums, PLEASE LIMIT YOURSELF TO ONE WRITING THREAD AT THE VERY MOST! All stories/writing threads should go in the Things I’m Making and Creating forum; all Cabin Announcements, SWC ideas/suggestions, or anything explaining what SWC does goes into Show and Tell. Collaborative writing would be Collaborations.” this information came from za-chary (source). here's a screenshot if it doesn't load:

we also have an swc mega-thread where people can post their writing if they don't want to make a topic here. using it is by no means required though — our writing fits the “things I'm making and creating” category as much as anyone else's

honeybreeze wrote:

Queer_Royalty wrote:

bump because they be comin' back

here. using it is by no means required though — our writing fits the “things I'm making and creating” category as much as anyone else's

Yes, but it's not general writing-it's writing for a specific event. Almost every SWC writing thread I see has no discussion on it, so I think it should be mandatory to put it in the megathread, just like a post about 3D printers should go into the 3D printer megathread, a SWC story should go into a SWC megathread (for that “session” or whatever its called)

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

Yes, but it's not general writing-it's writing for a specific event.

i don't write because of swc, i join swc because i write. the prompts are nice but i could do the activities without actually being in swc.

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

Almost every SWC writing thread I see has no discussion on it, so I think it should be mandatory to put it in the megathread

but some do and it's unfair to those people. we have dailies that encourage reading and responding to others' writing! and like bookie said above (fourth paragraph here), topics for writing that aren't for swc usually get the same amount of engagement. maybe one thread for all writing would make sense, but swc writing is basically the same as any other writing. if it wasn't labeled as being for swc, there'd be no way of knowing

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

just like a post about 3D printers should go into the 3D printer megathread, a SWC story should go into a SWC megathread

we're not posting about swc, we're posting writing. i'd say an “swc story” is a story about swc, not any story written by an swcer during swc - so just swc fanfic! and i think having a megathread for those would be epic actually (so long as it's not required to post there) i would love to be able to find all of them in one place so i can read them all

honeybreeze wrote:

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

Almost every SWC writing thread I see has no discussion on it, so I think it should be mandatory to put it in the megathread

but some do and it's unfair to those people. we have dailies that encourage reading and responding to others' writing! and like bookie said above (fourth paragraph here), topics for writing that aren't for swc usually get the same amount of engagement. maybe one thread for all writing would make sense, but swc writing is basically the same as any other writing. if it wasn't labeled as being for swc, there'd be no way of knowing

As a writer who doesn't do SWC, I get that. But even though they are individual pieces of writing, they all for the same thing, and I'm guessing it follows the same prompt, right? Say the theme were “apple.” ‘Writing’ is too broad a subject for there to be one specific topic for it, but maybe ‘Stories about Apples’ wouldn't be? How would you ('you' being the people in charge of SWC) feel about just creating one thread for each prompt and letting people post their stories there? Would that be a viable compromise between ‘one megathread’ and ‘every individual story gets a thread’?

As a sidenote, thank you for putting up a notice about which forum. I noticed some in Requests recently, but it's good to know that it's not that much of a widespread issue.

Queer_Royalty wrote:

honeybreeze wrote:

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

Almost every SWC writing thread I see has no discussion on it, so I think it should be mandatory to put it in the megathread

but some do and it's unfair to those people. we have dailies that encourage reading and responding to others' writing! and like bookie said above (fourth paragraph here), topics for writing that aren't for swc usually get the same amount of engagement. maybe one thread for all writing would make sense, but swc writing is basically the same as any other writing. if it wasn't labeled as being for swc, there'd be no way of knowing

As a writer who doesn't do SWC, I get that. But even though they are individual pieces of writing, they all for the same thing, and I'm guessing it follows the same prompt, right? Say the theme were “apple.” ‘Writing’ is too broad a subject for there to be one specific topic for it, but maybe ‘Stories about Apples’ wouldn't be? How would you ('you' being the people in charge of SWC) feel about just creating one thread for each prompt and letting people post their stories there? Would that be a viable compromise between ‘one megathread’ and ‘every individual story gets a thread’?

As a sidenote, thank you for putting up a notice about which forum. I noticed some in Requests recently, but it's good to know that it's not that much of a widespread issue.

there's no overarching theme! the ‘themes’ do sometimes appear in the form of daily and weekly activities, but making a subtopic for every daily and weekly will end in 30+ (clogged) forums. you could argue that's still less than the majority of campers creating their own thread, but with the new mega-thread that's less likely to happen, and i doubt we'll have nearly as many individual threads (also - ‘individual’ doesn't mean every story gets a thread, it means that one person can make a thread to post all their stories in ). furthermore, apart from dailies and weeklies we also have workshops and the writing competition, plus every person's individual prompt-free writing that they might share for feedback activities. we'd end up with more subtopics than if we stick to the current structure, i think? but correct me if i'm wrong or if you have a better idea. (side note: the writing competition entries could *technically* be put in one forum, but that's somewhat difficult to manage because those are the pieces of writing people get most feedback on considering they'll be judged, so the forum would likely get messy.)

Semi support, while one of the reasons stated in the OP is that it is not really anintrest beyond scratch I would argue against this, writing, the aim of the camp can be conducted outside of the scratch site. Although SWC does seem to fit the TIMAC forum some of the shorter stories can be moved.

-EmeraldThunder- wrote:

Semi support, while one of the reasons stated in the OP is that it is not really anintrest beyond scratch I would argue against this, writing, the aim of the camp can be conducted outside of the scratch site. Although SWC does seem to fit the TIMAC forum some of the shorter stories can be moved.

where do you suggest the shorter stories be moved to? other places on scratch are really not great for sharing writing
project/studio descs: for a project, you get 10k characters max, plus no italics and other formatting, same for studios but it's 5k
inside projects: paragraphs are a pain, still no formatting unless you upload it which is also a pain and not everyone knows how to code it to scroll
comments: 500 character limit + reply limit in studios, also no formatting
forums: 200k character limit! formatting! no coding necessary!

Since SWC has many cabin, each cabin could have it's own megathread. Other unrelated writing can go in TIMAC.

There was also a suggestion for a “Things I'm Writing” forum, which IMO is the best option.

honeybreeze wrote:

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

Yes, but it's not general writing-it's writing for a specific event.

i don't write because of swc, i join swc because i write. the prompts are nice but i could do the activities without actually being in swc.

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

Almost every SWC writing thread I see has no discussion on it, so I think it should be mandatory to put it in the megathread

but some do and it's unfair to those people. we have dailies that encourage reading and responding to others' writing! and like bookie said above (fourth paragraph here), topics for writing that aren't for swc usually get the same amount of engagement. maybe one thread for all writing would make sense, but swc writing is basically the same as any other writing. if it wasn't labeled as being for swc, there'd be no way of knowing

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

just like a post about 3D printers should go into the 3D printer megathread, a SWC story should go into a SWC megathread

we're not posting about swc, we're posting writing. i'd say an “swc story” is a story about swc, not any story written by an swcer during swc - so just swc fanfic! and i think having a megathread for those would be epic actually (so long as it's not required to post there) i would love to be able to find all of them in one place so i can read them all

1: Doesn't change the fact that it's an event, not general writing.
2: If everyone put their story into one thread, more stories would be seen because when you post, it sends you to your post and there would be other stories on that page (assuming they are not the first poster on that page)
3: Do I really have to say “story for SWC”?

Yeetoburro1 wrote:

honeybreeze wrote:

Queer_Royalty wrote:

bump because they be comin' back

here. using it is by no means required though — our writing fits the “things I'm making and creating” category as much as anyone else's

Yes, but it's not general writing-it's writing for a specific event. Almost every SWC writing thread I see has no discussion on it, so I think it should be mandatory to put it in the megathread, just like a post about 3D printers should go into the 3D printer megathread, a SWC story should go into a SWC megathread (for that “session” or whatever its called)

As you, most likely didn't see by the way you made your comment, SWC writing threads have a bunch of discussion. Critiquing, responding with encouragement, and general talking about writing are just a few examples. If you still don't see it join us, see how hard it is to put your writing in ANY other subforum. Although this is my first session, I have witnessed friendships being made and writing being shared.