Hey, not sure where to post something like this or if this is even possible to be implemented but i had an idea i think could be great for the community.
My idea essentialy is that there be a category loosely titled “elephant graveyard” or something similar where if you are a cg author and for whatever reason you lose interest in continuing your WIP this would be a category you could go to if you wished to and essentially you would be able to link your choicescript code there as a sort of skeleton for other authors who have the passion to pick up your WIP and make it their own maybe continuing the story or turning it into something else entirely of course always giving credit to the original author
A similar idea came up a while back, and there’s a whole thread somewhere full of reasons why it’s not as good an idea as it sounds. Let me see if I can find it … here you go.
Thanks for the reply, things like these were definitely on my mind when thinking about this which is why i came to the conclusion that it would be the authors themselves who would post their cs in this category, not someone just taking ideas or such from a random WIP they liked so at the same time it would essentially be the authors giving permission saying “hey, i no longer have the passion to continue this but at the same time I don’t want it to die out so I’ll put it here if anyone wishes to make something of it”
unfortunately I’m neither an author or a coder myself so I don’t know the difficulties of something like this but i think if handled carefully it has the possibility to be a good thing and would hopefully inspire creatitivity in some people rather than people just stealing thing they like from people who probably aren’t on the forums anymore to give their permission
Authors making their works available for use was part of the previous discussion, and the general thought was that it had too much potential to go wrong. It’s one thing to say, in theory, “I don’t want to finish this, and if someone does, fine,” and something else altogether to maintain that same attitude when someone actually does continue your work in a way you don’t like, a way that might even be diametrically opposed to your original intentions. It would potentially be more trouble than it’s worth, especially because there’s nothing to stop anyone now from contacting the author of an abandoned work and asking to finish it. For that matter, there’s nothing to stop an author now from making a post that says “I’m abandoning this, but I’d be thrilled if someone else wanted to take over.” The one thing I don’t ever remember seeing in these discussions was an author saying they would make use of an “elephant graveyard” thread if one were available, and as long as it’s not something authors want to participate in, it’s a moot point anyway.
I suspect this is unlikely to happen. A partially written story still has the original author as a copyright owner so COG would have to have their permission also to publish before it could go through. (I’ve written on multi-author games here so it is a thing. Even if they don’t want any revinue from the game.)
This is where stuff can go wrong. So lets say the previous author changes their mind and wants to finish the story, or doesn’t like what you’ve done with it, or prefers the story someone else is working on, or even they’ve decided not to be involved with the community any longer and so there’s no way to contact them. That leaves you without any way to submit to HG.
The only way I could think it could work is if they made it officially public domain use. This could still cause a few publishing issues with COG (you’d need to talk to them about what would be ok) if a large part of the story is freely available without change off HG.
