2011 Spring Poetry Tournament

Posted on February 25, 2011 by moonwalker
This is the sixth in a series of guest posts from select authors in Protagonize‘s creative writing community. Do you have something to say that might be of interest to our members? Feel free to contact us with blog ideas and share your passion for writing with our readers.

2011 Spring Poetry Tournament on ProtagonizeSpring is coming, can’t you feel it? The days are longer, the blizzards are shorter, and once in awhile the sun comes out. Eventually the snow will melt, the grass will grow, the trees will bud, and the flowers will bloom. Until then, we can harbour Spring in our hearts, with poetry. That’s right, poetry. Don’t you want to get your poetic juices flowing like the sap in the trees? Don’t you want to nourish your muse with verse?

Hiya, everyone. My name is Moonwalker, or Moon, if you like. I am thrilled to announce that I will be hosting the 2011 Spring Poetry Tournament. This will be the sixth tournament on Protagonize. Each one has evolved and grown from a small contest with eight competitors and three judges in the summer of 2009, to a full blown tournament with thirty competitors, and six judges. I will be following in the footsteps of such stellar hosts as ElzuWolfe, Archi_Teuthis, Rac7hel, smac972, and verse47.

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Say hello to Recommendations

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Nick

Recommendations on ProtagonizeRecommendations are the new black… err.. ratings. You know what I mean.

I’m sure most of our regular users have noticed the new Recommendations feature that I soft-launched throughout the site a few days ago. As was kindly suggested by our beta testers, a blog post is in order, if only to give you all an idea as to how recommendations work, and why you should use them.

So, there are three things you should know about recommendations right off the bat:

  1. You have a limited number of recommendations a day, depending on the type of account you have (i.e. subscribers get a couple of bonus recommendations.)
  2. You can only recommend any individual work once.
  3. You can’t recommend your own works, the same way you can’t rate your own works.

Recommendations aren’t meant to replace ratings at all; they work in tandem with them. Unlike ratings, however, you can only recommend an entire work — that being a story, poem, writing exercise, or other work on the site. I spent a good deal of time discussing the ratings concept with our beta tester group prior to building the feature, so we managed to refine the functionality to — in my opinion — be a lot more interesting and useful than your typical ratings.

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Introducing our newest moderator…

Posted on January 15, 2011 by Nick

weirdmagicI’ll keep this short and sweet — our moderators have come to a (rather difficult) decision, but they managed to come up with a unanimous first choice for our newest moderator: weirdmagic.

The moderation team and I would like to thank everyone who participated in our auditions. All of your entries were spectacularly awesome, and I was personally very pleased to see how much interest there was in the role from all sorts of members of our ever-growing writing community.

To those of you who applied, we’ll be keeping your applications on hand for future moderator selection, so don’t be too disappointed if you weren’t selected… you may just have to wait a little longer than you had anticipated. :)

And now, please join me in congratulating Namrata, our newest moderator — we think she’ll fit in with our team perfectly!

Posted in authors, Community building, Contests & Competitions, General | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Protagonize Moderator Auditions

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Nick

Some of you may recall that I posted a little teaser about this a few days back over on our Facebook page (oh — and be sure to become a fan if you’re not already!).

Now that we’ve reached the end of 2010, and with the new year encroaching a few brief hours away, what better time than to launch a little friendly competition amongst our Protagonize brethren?

Without further ado, I give you: the Protagonize Moderator Auditions!

Moderation on Protagonize

We’ve been short a moderator for a few months now, so I’ve decided that it’s time to staff up once more. As you’re all probably aware, being a moderator on Protagonize is a strictly a volunteer position, but it’s not without its benefits:

Moderators are able to: 

  • Edit, delete, and otherwise manage most types of content (stories, users, groups, comments, etc.) found on the site
  • Have free Plus-level account access during their tenure as a moderator
  • Have full beta access to new features as they are released
  • Get a their own @protagonize.com email address (!)
  • Create an unlimited number of groups
  • Access a special moderators-only dashboard showing trends on the site
  • Discuss site-related (and other) topics within a private Moderators-only group
  • Have a spiffy moderator badge on their profile and throughout the site
  • Ban-Hammer™ spammers (this is probably the most popular feature they enjoy :)
  • … and a bunch of other stuff I can’t recall off the top of my head right now.

So, you ask — details about the contest!

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Protagonize turns 3!

Posted on December 27, 2010 by Nick

Protagonize turns 3!It was three years ago this evening that I launched Protagonize, after several months of working off-and-on, followed by a couple of weeks of working like a maniac.

I still look back on those days and wonder how in the hell I managed to get that much done in so little time. :)

No, my family wasn’t particularly pleased that I spent every day leading up to Christmas frantically writing code in between wrapping gifts and shopping, but it all turned out pretty well, don’t you think?

I won’t go into a long drawling speech over what I’ve learned over the last three years, what I’ve done right or wrong, or where the site is going, but I will say this: I’ve had a great time and I’m guessing all 15,000 of you have, too. I’m looking forward to the next couple of months of being able to continue working on the site full-time, and I hope you’re all excited about where the site is headed. There are big changes in store for 2011 (all good, I promise.)

Here’s to Protagonize, and to our community, which makes it what it is. I hope you’re all enjoying the holidays and taking advantage of your time off to spend time with family, friends, catch up on your reading… and of course, to write! :)

Posted in Events, General, Short & Sweet | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments