One of my favorite forums on Lit is the story ideas, maybe we can have one here as well to allow people to suggest stories ideas that could make a good story as well as to seek others for collaborations and such.
What would we do with it? Brainstorm half a story idea to come up with a more solid idea? Then who gets to start the story as the owner and who gets to be the editors? I feel as though it would be more prudent simply to start the story and wait for others to build on the ideas in action, so that the story's getting written rather than planned to death.
Conceptual planning, such as planning out how the story unfolds along its branches, might not be such a reach, but it feels like there's overlap between the above paragraph and the feature submissions in the stories. That's just my take on it, anyhow. It makes more sense to me to just do the writing than to say what stories people want to see. Once they start the story going, explaining the guidelines and so forth, then that would cover the request, and other writers are welcome to fulfill that request by collaborating on the chapters for it.
I think anything can be a good story if the author believes it can. Apart from that, I have my own personal perspectives about what I'd rather read and write for, and with the core site already being about collaboration, everyone's inherently going to tweak it to reflect their own style, no matter how radical or subtle those differences may be.
Writing about the writing is a process of the writing itself, as well, and I'm worried that some people less attuned to the subtleties of the writing process might cite such threads as an example of plagiarism, even though ideas become intrinsically unique based on who's telling them, and whether a detail is subtle or not can be subjective.
Maybe I'm just being a stickler for simplicity. I see "Story Feedback" which is about reactions to specific stories, which seems to functionally mirror the comments and rating options of the site, but with the added effects of "advertising" the story on the forums. The "Authors' Hangout" section states it's to "Ask for help with your Chyoo story, organize projects, discuss, etc.", and I can't help but feel that perhaps this renders "Story Ideas" a bit redundant? Sorry to sound like a devil's advocate about this. I'm just seeing how this isn't exactly
mutually exclusive, which can result in looking for the same thing in two different places. I just hope that makes sense. I know I can be a bit too wordy when it comes to explaining my thoughts about these things.
In terms of suggestions, I don't want to look like I'm double-posting, even though this post spins off into a different topic:
What if we used the tags not only for searching stories, but also to give readers a warning about what the next thread was going to contain? The plus side is that if a story breaks off into content some readers aren't into, such as a fetish they dislike, they won't have to stumble upon reading it. The downside is that this might be a minor form of spoilers. Maybe users could set up tags they want to flag, and story threads in the stories and their maps could have some kind of indicator, such as red hover text, that will warn readers of a flagged tag.