STRUCTURAL CHANGES TO WILD -- PLEASE READ!

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Dearest All – Get ready for some changes here at Wild Poetry Forum!

As you all know, the posting of poetry for critique and commentary here at Wild has always been separated into individual categories. For quite a while now we’ve had forums entitled SUBLUXATION, CREATIVE VISUALIZATION, and BIOFEEDBACK, into which we instructed people to place their poems depending on the level of critique they were seeking, i.e., no critique/appreciation only in SUBLUXATION, light critique in CREATIVE VISUALIZATION, and heavy critique in BIOFEEDBACK.

While this system has worked for us in the past, it’s been only moderately successful at best. The majority of our members seem to congregate in CV, where they feel they will most likely interact with more members and, therefore, receive more commentary. And lately that trend has only been increasing. BIOFEEDBACK and SUBLUXATION have become almost hollow shells, with just a few postings a week. BIO is nearly dead. Many members have written to us, concerned about this lack of activity and asking for a solution.

So, we’ve reconsidered how we’ve been doing this. I suppose we only separated postings into individual forums based on the level of critique desired because most other poetry/writing critique boards do it this way too, not because it works particularly well. Therefore, we’re going to abandon the old way of doing things in favor of a new system that we hope will be an improvement.

As you may or may not have noticed, things have gotten a bit colorful here at Wild recently. Member names are now appearing in a variety of different shades. This will be the basis of the new system. Instead of multiple forums, we will now have only ONE MAIN FORUM here at Wild for posting your poetry for critique (some other specialized forums will remain, and I’ll explain that in a bit). From now on, most of the work posted at Wild will be in CREATIVE VISUALIZATION.

What’s different, though, is that you’ve all been assigned a color based on the level of critique you wish – no critique/appreciation only, light critique, and heavy critique. We wanted to make it easy to remember, so we used some of the colors of a stoplight as a model. The only color we couldn’t use was yellow as it was too glaring to read easily.

The new system is coded as follows:

RED (STOP) -- means you wish NO CRITIQUE, only appreciative commentary.
PURPLE (PROCEED WITH CAUTION) -- means you wish LIGHT CRITIQUE, with minor suggestions.
GREEN (GO) -- means you wish HEAVY CRITIQUE, with line-by-line detailed analysis.

The names of admin and staff here at Wild are in BLACK (which means you can pull out the big guns and fire at will).

This should make it easy for you to tell at a glance, before you even click on a post, what type of critique the author of that post would want you to give. You can also tell at a glance if you even wish to click on that post at all. For instance, if you are interested in only offering heavy crit, then only search for and respond to author names that are in GREEN. If you are only interested in reading and offering commentary to those who wish no crit, then look for those in RED. And so on.

While you are free to offer LESS in the way of crit for someone -- for example you only have the time or skills to offer light crit for a member who wishes heavy crit – please do NOT give MORE crit than someone wishes, i.e, heavy or even light crit for someone who wants only appreciative commentary. Remember – yes to less crit, no to more.

If the color you’ve been assigned is not the level of crit you want (in some instances, we made educated guesses), you are free to change that level at the two lower levels, i.e., reds (no crit) can become purples (light crit), purples can become reds. You will find that function in your USER CONTROL PANEL, under GROUPS. If you wish to switch to green (heavy crit) either now or in the future as your skills increase, please notify admin and we will make that change for you.

We will be leaving things as they are for a few days or until we feel that most members have had a chance to read, become familiar with, and ask questions about this new system. We have disabled the posting function in both SUBLUXATION and BIOFEEDBACK. You may still view the threads there, but you will be unable to post poems or commentary. In a few days, we will archive what is existing in both those forums and remove them. Nothing will be lost, and you will simply see CREATIVE VISUALIZATION as the main posting forum.

All other forums here at Wild will remain the same – BALANCING QI, THERAPEUTIC TOUCH, ASANAS, etc., and will still contain the specialized postings they were designed to hold.

You can feel free to post your questions in the main thread about this topic in ESSENTIAL OILS or write to us at adminwpf@wildpoetryforum.com. All requests to change to GREEN should be sent to us privately at that address.

Please do remember that no person and no system is perfect. We’re sure there will be some who do not welcome this change, and there will also be mistakes as we all learn how to navigate and offer critique based on the color-coding system. Do be tolerant of mistakes during the learning curve. We think once you become accustomed to the new system, you’ll realize how much easier it is to post, to offer the correct level of crit, and to find the types of posts you’d like to read with only one forum, instead of multiple forums, to search through.

And to those who main objection is “postings will move down the board too fast,” please keep in mind that most members here have already been shifting to posting mainly in CV, so we’re just formalizing what’s already been happening unofficially. We don’t expect a noticeable overloading of CV. Things will most likely remain stable. Also, the way you view the forum is under your control. You can have posts remain in the order in which they were posted or have new posts pop to the top.

Thank you all in advance for your patience with your fellow members and with new poets who will be joining us as we become accustomed to doing things a little differently. And thank you all for your support of Wild Poetry Forum!

WPF Administration