Board Thread:Suggestions and Questions/@comment-25375217-20150805160401

I was thinking about pitching today and I came up with some ideas that I think could make pitching better.

Pitching shows, movies, songs, etc. is arguably the main attraction of this wiki. Right now, the rules are pretty basic: you need three approvals (five for shows, movies, and pilots), one of which needs to be from an admin and the other needs to be from a corresponding staff member.

The first problem I'd like to address is the fact that a lot of our staff members and admins have a tendancy to go inactive for long periods of time. That's not really a huge deal, seeing as this is a website intended for entertainment and I understand they have lives, but it makes the rule that you need an admin and staff member's approval seem a little unfair. So I was thinking, what if there was a way to bypass that? What if you can get two extra approvals (so five for songs/contracts/etc., seven for shows/movies/etc.) and then no longer need the approval of an admin or staff member? This would show that a rather large portion of the community wants this to happen, and it's an easy way to bypass inactivity if necessary. It wouldn't be particularly easy, though, which still encourages approval from admins and staff members.

The second thing I'd like to address is disapprovals. Disapprovals are a good way to make sure that only well thought out or otherwise good shows are approved, but sometimes I feel like they're overused for no good reason. So what if we had some requirements? For example, when you make a disapproval you have to provide at least two sentences with at least five words each. If you're unable to do this, it's not a proper disapproval. Some leeway would be provided; for example, you can post "I agree with (USER)", which is only four words and one sentence, but if they posted two sentences with five words each it still counts.

And lastly, a very similar problem to the previous one. Recently we've had some sockpuppetry (I can think of two examples) and otherwise new users showing up and immediately approving something without any prior edits. We've discussed theories that you should have to make a certain number of edits before you can approve/disapprove, but determined that that wouldn't really help either. So I came up with this idea: what if you can't approve/disapprove unless you participated in the planning stage? This would keep new users from popping in just to approve something, while also encouraging the original pitcher to fully flesh out their pitch in the planning stage, since if they start the approval stage too soon they won't have enough people to approve. Any approvals or disapprovals posted by someone who did not participate in the planning stage in any way (even just saying "I like it!" once would count, though) would be ignored. An exception to this rule would be for stuff like songs or contracts, where there is very rarely any actual discussion before the approvals start.

I think that's everything :) Tell me what you think! 